RADIO HABANA CUBA
BREAKTHROUGH
Report on Science, Technology & the EnvironmentFor broadcast Sunday, November 11 & Thursday, November 15, 2001
Written and narrated by Arnaldo "Arnie" Coro, RHC's Science Editor
Hello, amigos! Welcome to another edition of Breakthrough, Radio Havana Cuba's Science, Technology and the Environment update, I am Arnaldo, Arnie, Coro, RHC's Science editor and today I'll tell you about how Cuba upgraded several of its high-power weather radar systems at very low cost, saving the nation large sums of foreign currency that would have otherwise been needed to buy completely new weather radar systems.
The idea of upgrading the existing network of seven high-power 10 centimeter radar stations owned and operated by the Cuban national weather service, the Instituto de Meterologia, was born in Camaguey province. There, a group of enthusiastic young engineers and technicians carefully studied and reviewed all the most recent information about high-power weather radars, and they soon found, very early in their work, that the existing equipment could be upgraded significantly and at very low cost, by adding some new electronic circuits and computer signal processing.
The Camaguey Soviet-built weather radar was the testbed for their experiments, and after more than a year's work, they presented the results to the National Science and Technology Forum, earning a national award. They then started to work on other radar stations that were made in Japan many years ago. The Japanese weather radar systems had seen lots of modifications to their high voltage power supply and even the high power magnetron vacuum tubes had been replaced with other types, but they had no signal processing equipment at all, so the Camaguey team moved to each location in order to upgrade them as soon as possible.
Their work has not been completed yet, but the radar stations already modified at La Bajada, Punta del Este, Pico San Juan and Casablanca provided extremely valuable information during the approach of Hurricane Michelle to the Cuban archipelago, helping weather forecasters to prepare much more accurate predictions in relation to the posssible track of the huge tropical cyclone that reached category 4 in the Saffir Simpson scale of 5. Now the Camaguey radar team is going to continue their job of upgrading the rest of Cuba's high-power radar stations, until all seven of them are on line with the most sophisticated digital signal processing technology available.
And this was Breakthrough for today, how Cuban engineers and technicians upgraded several of the nation's high power radar systems using digital signal processing to enhance their capability of processing weather information.
Jose Costa Pupo was my sound engineer and producer; I am Arnaldo, Arnie, Coro RHC's science editor, now wishing you excellent reception of our broadcasts on the air and on the web.
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