Tales Out of School from Bill Hite (continued)

I suppose a few of the older 'techs' will remember me as the fellow who took an overcoat to Port Moresby (it was very cold in Melbourne when I left). I wore a jumper most of the time while everyone else was wearing shorts and a shirt, however, my theory was that I spent most of the day inside where it was air-conditioned (the then new meteorological office had seven air-conditioners all running at once) and I could always take my jumper off if I had to work outside.

I suppose it is nearly time I joined the ranks of the retired. My favourite piece of equipment, the WF44 radar, has been modified and updated so much that I am sure many of those who worked on the original equipment would not recognise it. No more MCU (master control unit) or D&T (data and tracking) rack (now just a PC). In the transmitter no TWT (travelling wave tube) (instead a Low Noise Solid State amplifier; $500 instead of $8,000); in fact the only valves remaining are the magnetron and the modulator tube. In the aerial, no more encoders or encoder amplifiers.

The following are a few of the incidents that have stuck in my mind.

. . . Maurice Costello, among other things, worked on the new Fielden equipment. Some time later he expressed dissatisfaction with the transmitter unit as the manufacturer had mounted transformers directly on the circuit boards. He was instructed to give the unit a drop test (ie to drop it about half a metre onto the floor) to see if the transformers would break away. However, Maurice took the instruction literally and dropped the unit down a flight of wooden stairs. It did, however, prove the point; the transformers were still attached to the circuit board, but the bit it was attached to was no longer attached to the rest of the board.

Bureau of Meteorology