The 16th December 2014 will mark the 75th anniversary of the first radar echo received in South Africa. It all happened from the campus of Wits University on the 16th December 1939 and you can read about it in the paper by Brian Austin, G0GSF/ZS6BKW HERE
There were interesting and important personalities from our history involved, but there were also radio amateurs who operated and were involved with those first radars. It would be interesting to hear the stories of those radio amateurs.
One of them was Tom Cockbain, ZS2TC who, in 1945, first conceived of adapting a 10 GHz anti-submarine radar on an aircraft for use as a weather radar. Barely a month later it saved the day when they were flying the Prime Minister, Jan Smuts to the Peace Conference in San Francisco. ZS2TC went on to become the "father-of-radar" in South Africa and retired from the SAAF as a Major-General.
How many of you know of friends, family or radio amateurs who where involved in those early days of radar in South Africa?
73 de Vincent ZS6BTY