Was it 'Felix Leiter'?

Apologies for memory lapse, my excuse being that my memories of Dr No are rather more about 'Honey Ryder'.....:ok: But those earlier Bond movies were so much better than the more recent attempts with their excessively gratuitous violence, total lack of humour and worst of all, that scowling lead character.

I watched Castles in the Air yesterday on iPlayer. Unfortunately my Internet-connected TV monitor doesn't provide a good enough PC picture with HDMI, so I have to use VGA, which stretches the image no matter how much I try to sort out the resolution. A good programme nevertheless and Eddie Izzard is as good in this as he was as Erich Fellgiebel in Valkyrie.

Raids on London
 

MAINJAFAD, I noted your observation that by the end of 1935 the Air Ministry was committed to building 5 Chain Home Stations at Bawdsey and then took a look at my father's Pilots Flying Log Book that covered this period.

He was in late 1936 a pilot on No 64 (F) Squadron flying Hawker Demons having recently returned from Mesopotamia where they had been evolving tactics designed to repel bomber attacks on the UK. (How's that for anticipation!?)

Specifically, on the 21st of December 1936 he flew K4509 for 1 hour and 30 minutes from Martlesham Heath, where the Squadron was based, via Shellness and Bexley on a task recorded as, "TACTICAL EXERCISE. Raid on London. Fog and Smoke". Then again on the 21st of January 1937, in K4509, "Raid on London. Thick cloud."

I shall never know, but they might just have been simulating a hostile raid for the benefit of the ROC and radar defences associated with the Air Defence of Great Britain.

He went on, later, to fly Hurricanes on authorised defence sorties in the BoB, but as he was at the time on the strength of No 9 Service Flying Training School, RAF Hullavington, which was not under the control of Fighter Command, didn't qualify for the Battle of Britain Clasp. Later, he flew Wellingtons from RAF Marham so his 1939-45 Star now bears the Bomber Command Clasp.

Favourite transistor? OCP71 - the optical jobber. My dad could get dozens from work and we covered them with black bodge tape to make a more generally useful OC71. Could use them in just about everything a young lad wanted to make in Practical Wireless!
He taught Radar in REME towards the end of the War and later invented the siting unit for Swingfire when at Fairey's.

I have a book I picked up second hand
Britain's Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe by David Zimmerman (ISBN: 9781445600611) Which goes into the establishment of the whole of the system not just the radar technology, not a page turner but a very well researched and annotated book.
There's a small part of a Chain Home Lo station visible as you head West towards Portalbot on the M4. You can just see it from the motorway westbound just after the Margam Junction.
Subterranea Britannica: Sites:

I know some of the CH stations took a battering but I'm surprised the Luftwaffe didn't make a concerted effort to knock them all out, with Stuka dive bombers.
Is there any record of the Luftwaffe's tactics re. the stations?

And vice versa RimBam, I remember scraping the tops of transistors (probably OC71s) to get photo electric effects. Had a Philipps Electronic Engineer set which started me on a life long (so far) interest and career in electronics!

Because I had been stationed there when it was still operating the T80 and home to the School of Fighter Control, a well -meaning aunt gave me a book written by Gordon Kinsey - Bawdsey:Birth of the Beam (ISBN 0-86138-105-X). It gives a very good account of the what happened at Bawdsey before, during and after Watson Watt's time. A lot of the content is based on the first-hand knowledge of people who were based there at various times. An very interesting and informative read.

Valve, or tube, gear is highly thought of in high end Hi-Fi:


Unison Research Unison Research Preludio Integrated Valve Amplifier available from Vickers HiFi


Mullard valves are often used:


mullard tubes : mullardtubes.com


(NOS = New Old Stock)

Vanity, vanities, all is Vanity, saith the Preacher.
 

Very watchable programme (and there aren't many of those around these days).

But please, BBC Producers, who told you that we all went around in those times wearing "trilbies" like that flat-brimmed job lot that some con-artist sold you for your Costume Department ? (and you're not alone: did Channel 4 borrow them for "Foyle's" War ? - and there are other offenders)

The brims look as if they've been starched and ironed (and are worn), so that none deviate more than 2 degrees from the horizontal, and you could cut yourself on the edges. Know now that trilbies were very popular, but they came in all sizes of brim, tilted to suit the wearer (down in front, up aft) was common, some floppy, some not. I myself had a soft, malleable, blue velour job (Dunn's Best) and thought myself no end of a dog with my elegant light blue raincoat with a kind of "Prince-of-Wales Check".

And bowlers were still common, and rakish panamas, and berets, and we of the lower orders wore "rat-catchers". It was considered polite to take your hat off indoors (unless you were a policeman or some other official, when you kept it on to preserve your authority).

As for the microwaves, by '55 (and possibly earlier) our GCA Radar mechs had found that, by inserting slices of bread into a section of a waveguide, very nice toast could be made.:ok:

Hence the first commercial microwaves being named "Radar Range".

I appear to have something in common with other posters. A few years after my late father joined the RAF and won the war (the Japanese surrendered three days after he was sent to India but they left him out there for another 18 months just to make sure), he joined the Air Ministry and was somehow involved with land-based radar stations. Our family followed him around the country to live near West Prawle in Devon, St Margaret's Bay in Kent, Oxenhope Moor in Yorkshire and finally RAF Signals Command, Medmenham in Buckinghamshire. He also had reason to visit radar stations abroad and I'll never forget receiving a postcard from the Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore. This programme motivated me to research the radar he worked on and I believe he must have been involved with the post-war ROTOR air defence system.

We also had a TV he built himself during the early 1950s using a lurid green light-emanating oscilloscope and were very popular with the neighbours. Having been among the first to learn about solid state circuitry at night school, he was headhunted by Boeing in 1965 whereupon we moved to Renton then Bellevue in Washington State. He died in 1992.

Danny exactly so - as the poet Milligan put it (from American TV coppers one presumes): :ok:

As you are not supposed to put metallic objects in a microwave and I've heard of the Gold edging on a plate "fizzing", why does it not effect the metal box ?

Nutty ...

Short answer ... Faraday and his Cage

Long answer (more technical) ...

Metals in the Microwave