WR 7900 RADAR DATA REMOTING SYSTEM (RDRS)
Technical details

Manufactured by Enterprise Electronics corporation in the late 70's and early 80's, this equipment remotes weather watch data from a radar by landline and displays that data on a colour TV monitor. The system consisted of two 19"racks, a Data Transmitter at the radar site and a Data Receiver at the remote display site.

The Data Transmitter

The radar logarithmic video was digitised into six levels of intensity and transmitted along with azimuth, elevation angle and time via a modem at 2400 baud. A complete 360 degree picture took just over 2 minutes to be transmitted to the remote site.

The Data Receiver

The synchronous data stream received by the modem was scan converted from the transmitted polar format into X-Y format by a scan converter. This data was then stored in memory and the video content displayed as six different colours on a RGB colour monitor.

The Bureau converted a number of National Panasonic TC-1302/3 colour televisions for use as display monitors. An isolating transformer was fitted as these 32cm portable TVs had a live chassis and a small RGB video buffer was added so the TV could accept RGB video for display. This was done to reduce costs as colour monitors were considered quite expensive, remember personal computers had not arrived yet!