BAUDOT TO ASCII CONVERTER

This small piece of equipment was designed in 1981 by Alf West & Vladimir Kondratiev to alleviate the requirement for having a noisy and expensive teleprinter on WF3 radars.

The unit took the data from WF3 radar Raprint unit and drove a small, quiet parallel printer. It sent only the raw data as received from the radar to the printer. (It didn't calculate any wind data - that had to be done by the Observer using either a slide rule in the early days and later a HP programmable calculator.)

Deployment
The Unit was used on WF3 radars at Canberra and Mascot. It was also used on the Macleay Valley Radio Reporting Rain gauge system at Coffs Harbour Met. Office. Initially the units were installed with 40 column thermal printers. The last installation of Baudot to ASCII Converter was done on the WF44 radar Port Moresby around 1989. The choice of using a Converter was largely influenced by its reliability. By this time Dot-matrix printers with ribbon cartridges had had replaced the original Trendcom 100 thermal printers.