Pictures (and text) by Ian Jones

The weather balloons carried a radiosonde with sensors and a radio transmitter. Data from the sensors was radioed back to us, picked up on the Beukers receiver and displayed by a chart recorder, which is visible in the picture. We would read the values off the chart and plot them on a Vaisala diagram. From that we would compose the coded meteorological TEMP message and broadcast it into the global forecasting system through our data collection platform (DCP).

The BAS microcomputer arrived in January 1983. At that time there were commercially-made machines such as the Commodore, however BAS designed its own machine based on the 6809 microprocessor. Its first purpose was to read back and verify the tapes on which the magnetometers logged data, so that we could quickly spot if the magnetometers or the tape loggers were faulty. Of course the micro was used for other tasks too including word processing - most of the 1983 base reports were written on it. Some base members even wrote programs on it using BASIC or FORTH.

The main tubes of the base were built with wooden panels, but the interconnecting tunnels were built with armco. Here you can see clearly the flattened cross-section of the armco tubes which was designed to resist the pressure of ice as the base was buried under acccumulating snow. This type of armco construction was used for the whole of the previous Halley base, which was closed down after the Bransfield left in February 1984.