My talk will describe how I spent about twenty years, working mainly on North Site at RRE, to provide the Centre for Overseas Pest Research, (C.O.P.R) in Kensington, with a mobile microwave radar capability to study locust flight behaviour. The focus of interest was obviously not to be in Kensington, but in (mainly sandy) areas of the developing world. A very short (weeks) pilot study had already been carried out for C.O.P.R. three years earlier, in the Sahara desert, so the task was clearly feasible. However, C.O.P.R. was interested not only in locust flight. A very wide range of flying insect pest species fell squarely within their remit, and I will briefly outline how we had to expand radar capability from simple, centrimetric radar scanners, to a high power millimetric radar, and to a variety of novel beam-scanning procedures to improve target recognition capability. We also found that long term, high altitude faunal monitoring was useful capacity to have, and that was before we decided we also needed to build an harmonic radar for ground-skimming coverage of bees and tsetse flies etc.
C.V.
Joseph R Riley
Was born on 13th October, 1940, and lived in Buxton, Derbyshire. He studied at Buxton College G.C., and then read Physics at Wadham College, Oxford. He next taught Year 1 Physics at the Middle East Technical University (M.E.T.U.), Ankara, Turkey, returning to the UK at the end of the year. He then registered to study for a D.Phil. at Oxford, while working as a Senior Research Fellow on “Non-linear effects at microwave frequencies in the plasmas of mercury vapour positive columns” at the Royal Military College of Science, (RMCS), Shrivenham. In 1970 he left Shrivenham to join the Centre for Overseas Pest Research, and apart from a year spent in the USA working as a National Academy of Sciences Senior Research Associate at Wallops Island, Virginia, he worked for them until he retired in 2000.