The Bawdsey Research Station in 1938
How much do we in the Amateur Radio hobby know about radar? I must admit that even having been brought up during the 1939/45 war years my knowledge of radar was very sketchy. I knew that a cousin of mine who had his Skipper’s Ticket joined the Royal Navy in 1940 and as is typical of the Services, wasn’t put in charge of a naval vessel as he expected, but was drafted to become a Radar Operator, or as it was known then, an RDF (Radio Direction Finding) Operator. He explained it to me after the war that the system was similar to how bats find their way in the dark by making a high pitched noise which most humans cannot hear and the sound bounces off a near-by object such as a tree or a moth. Known as echolocation, the bat hears the sound and after a split second, it has worked out where to go and how far away the object is from it.