Peter Copland Works in Meteorological Electronics (continued)

Towards the end of 1967 one Wally Lloyd-Jones and family arrived several months before we were to leave. It must have been quite a shock for the Lloyd-Jones family; winter in England to winter in Melbourne and then summer in Charleville. The distances were quite a revelation, too; one afternoon we took them all to see a genuine sheep station owned by a school mate of mine. It was only 100 kilometres up the road toward Blackall, but would have been a whole weekend trip in England. With four kids they rated a house and had everything sorted out by the time we left for Cairns. Fred Soutter, who had just rejoined the Bureau after a stint with a post office at Aeroglen on the outskirts of Cairns, had been sent to Charleville too; he only arrived the week we left so I did not get to know him too well.

After six weeks leave I went to Cairns. Still no Bureau house, but the green countryside with hills, trees, and rain made it worth it. Cairns had both Cossor and WF2 radars, and Jack Berry to show how it all worked. The WF2 radar was brand new, not even a proper T spanner to open the RF unit. Actually it was only on loan, and was to go to Willis Island as soon as possible. The proper Cairns radar was the WF1 but its floor had rotted through and an Observer had been confronted by a snake while doing a 1715 UTC balloon flight. He had chickened out, of course, and aborted the flight. The WF1 radar was sent to Melbourne to be installed in a WF2 radar cabin, by Radio Corporation, I think.

Now the Cossor was a real radar, sitting on a million dollar house block on the edge of an 840 metres high mountain. In those days it was state of the art; no more climbing around on hands and knees to get at the magnetron and modulator, racks out in the open and most units draw mounted. The microwave video and VHF control links were probably as complex and of equal importance as the radar; one was somewhat useless without the other. Jack Berry resided in the Bureau house up in the mountains only five or six kilometres from the radar. The plan was for a 'tech' to move into the accommodation in the radar building when a cyclone was approaching and, if required, to do rareps (radar rainfall observations) and phone or radio out the information. I do not know if it ever happened. It would have been a hard decision, to leave family to the cyclone and hide on top of the mountain. The road up the mountain from Cairns was often closed with heavy rain. Jack spent quite a few happy hours trying to teach me how the Cossor and the WF2 radars worked, even down to the backwards Grey cyclic code used for the Cossor PPI (plan position indicator).

Bureau of Meteorology