Featured on this page are details of other
important and interesting artefacts we have been able to
compile through our oral history project. Many of
the items have been provided by our contributors.
 Working on an East Coast Chain
Home Tower– 1953 (just after the East Coast floods) -
David Harrison
First the technical bit – The
receiver dipoles were mounted at 120 ft. and 190 ft. up
the 240 ft. wooden lattice towers. The towers were rigid
and did not sway but they vibrated in a high wind. The
method of detecting whether an echo was in front or behind
was by separating the reflector dipole and then shorting
it together by pushing the ‘sense’ button on the receiver.
The shorting was achieved by a mercury relay which
comprised a horizontal glass tube with a pool of mercury
at each end. When the sense button was pushed, an iron
strip was pushed into the mercury and made the contacts.
On windy days the vibration caused
the mercury to accumulate at one end, with the result that
the operator on the Tube would shout “Mech. The
reflector’s gone (again)”
So on this wintry day in 1953 I had
to climb 190 ft. up the receiver tower in a gale in the
middle of the night, to take the lid off the relay box and
flick the glass tube to move the mercury back in place.
Whilst I did this, strapped to the
central feeder, Flight Sergeant Ted Lawrence stood on the
ladder and held the torch. At some stage he swung the
torch around and illuminated the remains of the adjacent
tower which had collapsed in the January gales.
We were both relieved to get back
into the receiver block! |
