On 2013-04-22 06:53:25 +0000, Lindisfarne Poacher said:

yttiw wrote:
On 2013-04-21 20:15:12 +0000, James Brown said:

I am embarking on a series of articles regarding my ventures into
remote imaging via meteorological satellites - I began receiving images
from home-brew equipment back in the 1970's.
One small technical point, would anyone know when the Met office
stopped using the wet paper facsimile machines for chart and imagery
read out? I remember visiting the Cardiff Met office and carrying off
some of those slightly fuzzy purplish print-outs, but can't quite
remember when that would have been.
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
James

I would say that would be the early to mid 1990's?

I think that until then, the file size of a satellite photo was too large
to be transmitted in less than a day, by the communications systems that
were in place at the time. I remember using a 2400 and/or 4800 baud
modem, and when the 9600 came out we thought it was almost unbelievably fast.

I have vague memories of a rather noisy device slowly turning out soggy
charts which had to be hung out to dry when I worked at a certain
establishment near High Wycombe in the 70's. Was this one of the machines
you guys are referring to?

Yes, those are the ones. However, the technology improved a little over
the years and the old wet (and highly inflammable) paper was replaced
by a more stable substance which was much less likely to catch fire on
contact in the bin with a discarded cigarette end.

In later years satellite transmissions had their own dedicated
facsimilie channels, and receiver machines that were of a slightly
higher resolution than the ones that produced plotted charts and the
like.

However, they were seldom working to their specification and often the
various grey shades merged into two:- black and white. This made
interpretation of the cloud structure well nigh impossible on many
occasions, and it was a revolution when the first satellite photos were
downloaded onto a computer and displayed on a monitor.