"Jeremy Handscomb" wrote in message
...
Thanks for all your help, Martin. What does APT mean and were you
being
serious?!


APT = automatic picture transmission; this is the system whereby you can
pull-down imagery as the satellite passes overhead your location; I'm
out of date on all this now (Bernard B. may be able to help), but as a
sproggy Assistant on a lonely island off Oman in the early '70's, we
used to have to go to a little hut at certain times and *manually* point
the aerial array at the NOAA satellites (and we tried for the Russian
Meteor's too), as they passed overhead. You had to work out the
horizon-azimuth, times etc from the NOAA-predicts., then point the array
and wait for the signal. The aerial was tracked as the spacecraft passed
overhead, and the image was downloaded line by line (the spacecraft had
a scanning mirror which acquired the earth-view at the sub-satellite
point), and read onto a facsimile recorder ... then you had to choose
the appropriate lat/long grid to trace on to the image etc.

All a bit of a black art, and I'm sure it's a lot more sophisticated
now!

Have you tried to contact Bill Pike? He may have the image you require.

Martin.