Peter Copland Works in Meteorological Electronics (continued)

Merv almost had another disaster when he was in the process of raising his house a couple of feet to build in underneath. The house had been jacked up and was sitting on timber trestles when a cyclone came down the coast in almost midwinter. I think it stopped at about Bundaberg; he was in a bit of a panic for awhile.

I also became familiar with sferics at Eagle Farm. The system consisted of a series of observation stations, one to two thousand kilometres apart, using low frequency, 10 or 15 kHz dual (stereo) receivers with large directional loop aerials. The loops were at right angles, and with the sense input, gave a directional flash when their outputs were combined in the display on a CRT. One could spend 20 minutes in the dark, every six hours, aligning the receiver and peering at the lightning flashes on the CRO (black or flash ) trying to determine which flash the 'caller' was referring to. After your observed bearing of that flash was relayed to the 'controller', he used a table map of Australia, with a string feeding from each stations' position and having a corresponding bearing scale in a different colour for each station around the maps perimeter. As each station reported the bearing of the flash, that station's string was pulled out to that bearing and, in theory, where the strings crossed was the origin of the flash. I think the system was quite successful but the cost of a three or four station phone link in those days would have been high, and the hook-up was often poor. However, it was the best thing since sliced bread to find out all the Bureau gossip, and the aerial hut was great for spiders. The stations as I recall were Townsville, Eagle Farm, Charleville, Laverton, Alice Springs or Darwin, Perth and sometimes, I think, Wilkes in Antarctica.

I spent January and February 1963 in Charleville while one 'Bugs' Bonnar was on leave. It was my first real work by myself, and my first and last attempt to do a sole radar/radiosonde balloon flight with a non auto-follow radar. This occurred when my offsider, ex-Observer (Radio), Bob Payne, could only stay long enough to help release the 2300 UTC radiosonde train before going to try to rescue his household goods from a flood in town. The flight wasn't too successful since the balloon iced-up at around 500 hPa, and I got a please explain some months later as to the correctness of the bar setting. This was also the first time I had to do all the climate temp returns and stores records.

In October 1963 I was transferred to Willis Island for 12 months. Great protests resulted, and in early December 1963 I ended up at Giles. There was an 'extended hand-over' from Ned Kennedy; this was while the pilot ate his lunch before he returned, with Ned, to Alice Springs.

Bureau of Meteorology