Charivaria
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Charivaria
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Introduction
This all started with a posting to MOGS by Brian Partridge:
You might like to know that I spent a day at Jodrell bank helping to install a new transmitter. Apart from having to crawl through one of the cable ducts because I was the smallest one there I got the opportunity to go into the bowl as it was in the parked upright position. We had to take a security token to show that we were on the bowl and then wandered around this massive dish observing the antenna mast (180ft) in the middle. We were told the story about when some aerial parts were melted when the dish pointed at the sun for a short while, well it was at the focus of the dish!!!. They were about to invert the bowl when we came off and nearly did so with one of our party still there, he had not taken the token. Whilst inverted it relied solely on the servo systems to stay in one place as there was no braking in that attitude, there was only one man allowed to do this exercise (a senior man from the servo company). We also met Prof Lovell who was a very eccentric chap !!! This was a great experience for an apprentice and was also the first time I had ever been north of Rugby.
Don Halstead picked up on this - while following up Bernard de Neumann's post about his uncle Eric Dixon he came across an article in the Royal Society's archives entitled "Diversions of a radio telescope" co-authored by Bernard Lovell, in which he describes the use of the 250-foot dish and a Marconi transmitter to create an ICBM early warning system capable of detecting a 10 cm square target at a range of 500 km.
Charivaria
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