Chapter 6: The Birth of the Instrument Section (continued)

In 1940 Boswell and Campbell from PMG Research Laboratory and I manufactured a prototype air-borne radiosonde transmitter using two separate triode valves mounted with other components in a shoe-box. Receiving equipment was a hotch-potch from the PMG labs. We tested it at Mont Park in April 1940 on a beautiful sunny day, using 600g balloons in three tandem pairs, and reached 23 000 feet in light westerly winds. Allan Cornish, Bill Boswell, John Campbell, Jim Collins and Max Cassidy were doing the theodolite tracking.

The Bureau imported one radiosonde ground receiving equipment manufactured by Julian Friez, a division of Bendix. This consisted of a receiver and a cyclo-ray recorder which printed dots on a paper roll. Meanwhile PMG research thought they could develop a superheterodyne one, which would be a lot easier to handle. After trial of a prototype they built about a dozen receivers which we used to equip an Australian network of radiosonde stations. We imported Speedomax recorders from the US to operate with our receivers.

Lieutenant Commander Dimitrevic of the US Navy and I toured around Australia installing the ground equipment. Dimmy was attached to the Bureau for several months in 1942. He worked in the Air-mass and Frontal Analysis Section briefly. Dimmy and I then visited Charleville during the winter of 1942 where we temporarily installed Friez ground equipment and used imported Diamond-Hinman air-borne transmitters to test the equipment. These radiosondes were imported because they were just coming into production locally.

We next went to Brisbane and installed ground equipment at a US Navy base at Hamilton Reach, on the Brisbane River.

Bureau of Meteorology