Oral History Gallery

Equipment 12 - You needed less operators 1980s

Name: Kevin Winter

Service: 1974 - 2008

Rate: Warrant Officer

Branch: Warfare / Radar

Kevin Winter joined the Navy in 1974 as a Radar Operator. Throughout his early career Kevin's role in the Operations Room was to interpret and plot the information received from the ships radars. This up to date picture allowed the captain to navigate and fight the ship. At this time it was a manual task; receiving separate bits of information and bringing them together on a plotting table using a chinagraph penci and trigonometry.

The 1980s saw the start of increasingly automated systems. Information from radars and other sensors were brought together onto a central computer, which produced the picture. As a result the manual plotting table was no longer needed and the role of the Radar Operators, like Kevin, changed.

Kevin talks about how the new automatic radar tracking systems of the 1980s affected the numbers of Radar Operators needed.

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Extract Text (Duration01.06)

Previously I mentioned that all the tracking of radar contacts was done manually, so you had somebody within an automated system who had to initiate a track on a radar contact, track it a couple of times before it then took over by rate aiding and worked out where it was going to be in the next six minutes. So it kept that symbology on top of the radar contact. This system now started to use track extractors, so it was automatically forming the track, automatically updating it, which again is another step ahead. What that meant was that for the Type 23 Command System you needed less operators, so where as previously, for a Type 42 for example, you had four air compilers, who would actually be initiating those tracks, updating them, keeping them on track, you didn't need that. So you had one person who basically validated the picture rather than initiating and tracking the radar contacts.