April 1960 Popular Electronics
Table
of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
from
Popular Electronics,
published October 1954 - April 1985. All copyrights are hereby acknowledged.
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Equipment Trailer nearest in photo, Maintenance trailer inline
and connected to the rear, RAPCON separate and to the right. ASR & IFF antennas
toward center of trailer, PAR Elevation antenna nearest. (circa 1979-82)
This is cool. I saw a U.S.
Air Force recruitment advertisement in a 1960 edition of Popular Electronics pitching
careers as radar operators (air traffic control) and technicians (maintenance).
The picture has the dual-display glide path and elevation sweeps from the MPN/13/14
radar system that I worked on in the late 1970s - early 1980s. A photo I took circa
1980 of our unit based at Robins AFB, Georgia, is shown below. The precision approach
radar (PAR) operated at x-band (10 GHz) with an operational range of 10 nautical
miles.

B&W photo of PAR display showing Elevation display at top
and Azimuth display on bottom. Yes, it is in dire need of alignment.
The azimuth and elevation antennas were mechanically swept with motors that changed
the geometry of a waveguide having dipole stubs along its length. The entire PAR
system was built with vacuum tubes and chassis using point-to-point wiring. Sweep
patterns on the CRT were aligned using an iterative procedure to adjust linearity,
x-y position, outline, size, course line and glide slope centerlines, etc. It could
be quite frustrating until you got the hang of it. Unlike the airport surveillance
radar (ASR) portion of the system which was used for flight path vectoring and aircraft
separation while at cruising and transition altitudes, the PAR was used to guide
aircraft down nearly to the ground in "blind landings." Air traffic controllers
were in constant contact with the pilots giving them corrections as needed to stay
centered on the line. I don't recall the decision height for USAF airplanes, but
for civilian aviation in Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), it can be as low as 50 feet
- that is not much time to stop a landing approach and transition to a missed approach
maneuver.

Posted June 10, 2019 (updated from original post on 9/25/2012)
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