Peter Copland Works in Meteorological Electronics (continued)

A few of my lasting impressions from these visits are the three or four people required to complete a balloon flight, the guys rolling 44 gallon drums of water down the road in the evening, the motorists who turned off their lights for oncoming traffic, the one fully trained Indonesian 'tech' to look after all the electronics in the country, not being able to see the Komodo Dragon because it had eaten its keeper the night before, the British Naval guns still buried in the hills which tried to keep out the Japanese during WWII and spending all day getting some spares through local customs, the main hold up being the lack of an Indonesian word translating to Magnetron.

In the Darwin workshop we had a transceiver which, I think, belonged to Foreign Affairs, and we worked a regular schedule with the Kupang meteorological office. One small problem, though, we had to get one of our Philippine meteorologists to act as an interpreter. However, with this help it was possible for us to get spares from Tennant Creek fairly easily.

Darwin was my first encounter with the Bureau's facsimile system. Previously the PMG had supplied the service and maintenance; now the system had become part of our responsibility. There were 18 inch (about 46 cm) LEA and LBM recorders and giant 18 inch transmitters on the national network and AXM radiofacsimile broadcast, and there was a nine inch system linking the RFC with the airport. Fortunately, we did not have to worry too much about the telegraph system, which was still with the PMG. We had the Minolta wet system photocopier, and later in the new office, two of them with, in theory, enough spares for a complete rebuild.

This was also the new world of the satellite. At Emery Point, accessed through part of the Army compound, the Bureau operated a remote satellite tracking system designed to track polar orbiting NOAA weather satellites. This was a large, remotely controlled helical antenna assembly, with the control unit in the RFC communication centre and operated by the communications staff. The tracking data was fed into the control unit before each satellite pass. The received satellite picture information was recorded on the traditional Nagra 4 tape recorders. Picture information was also received over landline from a similar tracking system in Melbourne.

This picture information was made visible by scanning photographically sensitive paper in a special facsimile recorder, the D900S1, I think. The approximately 23 centimetre square photographic paper was then developed in an instant (almost) processing machine. Grid lines were drawn on the picture. The finished product was almost a real time photograph.

Bureau of Meteorology