Talk:Cobra Mist

Untitled
Here's an amusing story I heard directly from one of the members of the USAF team that tried to tackle the problems with the FPS-95. I've never seen this story elsewhere, so perhaps one should take it with a grain of salt, though *I* trust the source. It does seem like a story worth preserving, if true.

During the period (1973) in which the noise problems with the radar were being investigated, one of the tests they asked the operators to participate in was to track targets of opportunity between Central Europe and the Soviet Union. One of the common ways this was done was to take friendly flight plans in this area and correlate them with targets seen on the radar. One day the officer on duty decided to try something a little different. A Russian VIP was scheduled to fly from Moscow to Berlin that day, and the trip was well-publicized enough that his flight schedule was known to all in advance. The officer had the operators track the flight, and duly filed a report on their success that made its way back to the upper echelons of the AF which were closely monitoring, and becoming increasingly irritated about, the status of the FPS-95.

Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to the officer, the flight had been cancelled.

This was the straw that broke the camel's back. The FPS-95 system was ordered to be shut down, and to make sure that it stayed shut down and was not revived, the AF specifically ordered that the antenna arrays be bulldozed into the ocean.

This story was told to me in 1990, and I was told that I should be careful who I mentioned it to as people were still really sensitive about this particular episode.

Transmitter Power
... the most powerful commercial radio stations at 50 kW ...

This is an understatement. Voice of America had a 1000 kW transmitter in the 60s, and I believe that this was not the highest power used by an external service. However, it should be noted that a 10 MW broadband transmitter is a technical achievement. 81.130.114.232 15:12, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Incomplete reference
Reference 4 ( http://web.archive.org/web/20100528053916/http://www.dod.gov/pubs/foi/reading_room/480.pdf ) seems to only include the odd numbered pages of the report. A transcript of the report is available at: http://www.cufon.org/cufon/cobramst.htm Ssscienccce (talk) 18:50, 11 May 2012 (UTC)