I still remember the first radar i had encounter fall all the way back in 1990. It was ARPA Decca 1626 True Motion X-band radar. During that time, i have no idea what is this piece of equipment doing good for us? I see yellow patches on the PPI(Plan Position Indicator) screen rotate in clockwise circular motion. This yellow patches were known as video or targets or return echo from the transmission of radar which help us identified the objects around us up to 48nm. Although the radar screen can show up to 96nm, in practice, it was not possible to achieve 96nm due to the power output from a 25Kw magnetron. It was a good piece of equipment at that point of time. This equipment had more than 20 slot cards in the lower rack which help in the processing of radar video, calculate dead reckoning function...etc. I cannot remember whether it was connected with GPS as at that time only transit satelite was available. I do remember this piece of equipment can acquire a maximum of 20 targets at any one time. It was one of the latest technology at that time.
Kelvin hughes radtrack radar was also one of the ARPA radar with latest technology at that time.
Then in 1991, there comes a PC radar which can acquire 50 targets at one time. This piece of equipment process radar video in a digitize format. The screen changes from PPI to a multicolor VGA monitor.
It was the DB2000I display processing monitor interface with Decca I-band transceiver. DB2000I comes with a floppy drive slot, powered by a few processors cards which run by intel microprocessor 80286 and 80287.
These processors include RDD, RTS and OPC processor. Raw video was converted by radar scan converter from analog to digital. The instructor from Norcontrol Norway - Mr. Paul Herfjord had travel down to Singapore in Jan 1992 for the DataBridge2000 technical training course.
Since then i have been servicing these few pieces of equipments from these few companies until now.
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