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I tracked every pass that satellite made during the hours of 8:00am and 4:00pm, Mon-Fri as it came over Monterey, Calif. from the Met Lab at the US Navy Postgraduate School.

We had a receiver with an antenna on the roof of a nearby building; inside the lobby of our station we had the equipment placed and plotted a tracking map from NWS data on the days we were to record the path.

Our equipment could only be described as crude and required quite accurate pre-placement of the antenna, careful adjustment based on audio and oscilloscope gain to catch the very first signals and then to track the entire horizon to horizon sweep.

For a recorder, we had borrowed a Wollensak 4-track tape deck from the audio/visual department that was normally used for taping lectures.

The printer was a thermofax machine that used 10” paper rolls that were geared to advance at the rate of about 100 rasters per minute giving us rather sharp detail.

We used headphones to catch the radio signal as soon as it crossed the horizon, adjusted the tracking antenna to pinpoint the bird and then manually tracked it throughout its average 28 min duration.

We then immediately tore off the copies, sheared them into three pictures, transperatized them and ran them through an Ozalid Diazo machine using black image paper.

One set was then run again for master Mylar copies for instructional use, another set on paper used for submission to Colorado while a third set was was made on paper for our existing weather chart display.

By carefully overlaying and trimming you could get an image with all three sets showing our surrounding area in fascinating detail.

WE were both pleased and surprised to learn later that our products were much sharper and clearer than our sister station in La Jolla, Calif. which had all the bells and whistles and was “automated.”

Fun times, especially one morning when we were warming up the set and trying to tune to a reseved frequency only to be startled to hear a music station out of San Jose; as soon as we heard the call letters, we rushed to the phone, called 411 and got hold of the station manager who got the problem resolved with his broadcast just in time to catch old Tiros crossing our horizon.

We also tracked some of the Nimbus series.