The following are my memories of working on the Jindalee Over the Horizon Radar Network (JORN) Project Phase 3, both in Australia and the UK, from August 1991 to January 1999. The opinions and errors are mine. By the end of this time my promotion progress in what had been GEC Marconi Radar and Defence Systems had peaked and was going downhill as the Company was run down, and my ‘sell by date’ was approaching. It was a case of survival until escape through retirement was possible; that was to be another 10 years. Readers of this article may consider the contents as being self-indulgent. However, they are a record of events which don’t have any great significance to those who weren’t there, but reflect some personnel involved, and activities at a lower level than those usually recorded in the history of a project.
In April 1989 I finished working as the S723 Trials Manager on the Martello S723 Project, following the handovers to the customers, RAF and RDAF. E W G (Ron) Cummings, who had been the Project Manager, retired from the Operations Department of Air Space Control Division. John Mackinnon ACD Operations Manager sent me to work for Bob Ditchfield, Contracts Manager on the BACCHUS Project; where Peter Bain was the Project Manager. After 6 months of sorting out various engineering tasks on the contract for Bob, I was released to assist Roger Towell for a month, on the planning for 743D Projects, specifically the KAWAL Project. In October 1989 I was the Bid Manager for the Captain’s Combat Aid Project. From the October to February 1990 I worked with Malcolm Richardson, John Bentley and David Loydall on the compilation of the bid, where Roger Basquill was the Sales Bid Dept. contact. From February to April 1990 I worked on the LATCC RAPDS Bid as the Project Bid Manager, although responsibility for the Bid lay with the Sales Department.
In April 1990 I was working for Dave Hope in the 743D Development Project Management Department of the Air Space Control Division as the Project Manager 743D for Site Commissioning. I exchanged the position with Don Ashmore, as I became the Project Manager 743D Development Models in April 1991. Setting up and building a half spine and operations cabin development equipment in the PCTA at WRW with Ray Wombwell. I was also involved with Gary Minors in the reutilising of the software rig equipment based on the BACCHUS test rigs. It was decided that the S713A spine owned by RAFO at Rivenhall, would be useful for the Development Engineering Department, under Jim Mason, to prove various engineering developments for 743D. Thus I brought the spine back from the Royal Air Force of Oman, rather than use the spare S723 spine from MOD. At this time I shared an office in M Building with Cormac Duffin, who was one of the Project Progamme Managers on one of the three 743D Projects (KAWAL, MUSK and DELTA).
In June 1991 I was passing the desk of Vic Turner whose job it was to recruit personnel for JORN, and he had a chart of positions, open on his desk. Taking a passing interest in his predicament at that moment; the person who had been allocated the Documentation Manager job, had just said that they didn’t want to go to Australia; I volunteered to go there myself. After some discussion with John Pearce the JORN Contract Manager; and after I had discussed this with my wife, it was decided that we would go with the whole family of three children.
On 21st August 1991 we flew from Heathrow to Melbourne with Mike Ashton and Charles Lynas-Gray, and were picked up at the airport by the representative of the Company’s relocation team. We were taken to Station Pier Condominium in Port Melbourne, where we were to be given six weeks residence. The following days we were taken out to various parts of Melbourne to find some rental accommodation. Neville Jessop took us to Melbourne Zoo at the weekend. The requirement for our eldest daughter to go to school pushed us into an early decision with respect to taking on rental accommodation in Glen Waverley.
Work was at 35, Winterton Road, Clayton in a Telstra (Telecomm Australia) building where John Pearce was General Manager GMSPL Pty. HF Division (Australia), and Keith Hainsworth the Finance Manager. They had both taken up residence near the Telstra JORN Project Director Bob de Boer and his team, for running the Project.
Other members of the team with their personnel were based in 22, Winterton Road, Clayton with the Telstra Engineering teams. They were Roger Basquill C/SCSC Manager, Brian Daniel Signal Processing Manager, Arthur Feist GMSPL HF Division JORN Project Manager (came later to be based in 35, Winterton Road), Ian Gillis Requirements Manager, Neville Jessop Configuration Manager, Ron Kelly Quality Manager, Terry Soame Engineering Manager, Fallon Stewart System Manager and John Whittingham Contracts Manager. Later on, 22, Winterton Road was found to have an asbestos problem, and the Marconi personnel were moved out to 6, Winterton Road into a Marconi only building.
Other UK personnel who came out to Australia (not mentioned elsewhere in the text, and not a complete list) were E (Ted) Aldous, Jim Backus, Grant Cartiledge, Jim Chapman (2nd General Manager later arrival), Paul Clissold, Allan Coxson, Mike Darby, Glen Dickel, Adrian Dickson, Steve Foyle, Dave Gauld, Jonathan Griffith-Jones, Sue Hardy, Tony Hardy, Debbie Hayes, Julian Hellebrand, Paul Holt, Mike Jenkinson, Aidan Joy, John Kyan and Hitesh Pabari. Anton Rech, George Robinson (3rd General Manager later arrival), Abdul Sawar, Tony Smith, Andy Starritt, Denis Stringer, John Sutton, H M (Jim) Waddell and John Whitcombe.
Four GMSPL HF Division Australian personnel worth mentioning, with whom I had a large interface were George Breen, ILS Consultant, and Tony Olejnicki, EMC / EMI Consultant; as well as Bob Sykes, ILS Manager, who came to the UK as GMCSL JORN Programme Manager. Mark Parker was the IT operative for the Company.
My job was initially to set up the communications systems with the UK, the ISDN link and the Facsimile distribution system. I was also involved in technology transfer as per the contract in the form of work procedures.
I had the unenviable task of reading the engineering specifications being generated to ensure that they were in the correct format, configuration, spelling, grammar, syntax etc. before I handed them over to my counterpart Jake Romijn in Telstra. It was not my job to comment on the engineering content or the efficacy or standard of the engineering. Now I have always considered myself to be a reasonably practical and pragmatic person, but I could not actually envisage what the design was in many of the contexts that I read, and how it related to anything else. The Requirements flow down from the Military Standard approach seemed to distort the whole notion of a practical working design. These were early days and the standard did improve. Later, I even wrote some specifications myself, only because the system engineer involved, Dave Gauld, had been given an impossible number in the timescale allotted.
Part of my job was to train an Australian to take over from me. Neville Jessop and myself interviewed a few candidates, and we chose a young graduate Erika Gortva. I eventually was moved by Arthur Feist across to help Telstra about 18 months into my 4-year contract.
JORN was probably the most interesting engineering project that I ever worked on. I learnt a considerable amount about subjects that I never dreamt of experiencing in a European environment. Some of these which won’t set the world on fire, are as follows :-
Termites:- The Australian Standard lists over 300 members of the species. Their habitats and bad habits.
Noise:- The parameters of adiabatic noise on circuitry in the context of power generation.
Dust:- There are Qty 4 test dusts for calibrating filters.
Flora:- There is a vine in Western Australia whose roots seek out underground cables and strangles them to death.
Fauna:- Parakeets, Lorikeets, Cockatoos – Depending upon which part of the continent, some attack overhead cables. Telstra had a test bed for cables in the bird cages up at Healesville Sanctuary.
Wombats:- Natures bulldozers, that undermine buildings.
This all before we get to spiders, snakes and crocodiles.
JORN did suffer a major problem from the outset, and that was instituted at the planning stage. It had an unrealistic implementation timescale of six years imposed upon the Project by the Australian Government. It was plainly obvious to those who had worked on similar projects of such size, scale and complexity, that double the length of time was more likely. This was to prove to be the outcome as JORN went operational in 2003.
There were a considerable number of PhDs on JORN, not just from Marconi but also Telstra. I know one had his degree in upper weather patterns, and another worked on the effects of wind turbines on radar waves. At one stage in Australia I could count six that I knew, and I worked for a short while for Dr Andrew Michelaides in 22, Winterton Road, Clayton, Melbourne. We also had our own:- Brian Daniel, Alan Hartley, Jim Parry, Brent Summers, can’t remember the other name. Always felt that they should have been kept in a darkened room, pulled out when required, and then refiled until needed again; rather than letting them loose on a continuous basis.
My job with Andrew was to write a report on the status of Requirements for the Site Facilities. I should say at this point that the Facilities in Telstra were run by Jim Dunlop as manager, Ulf Kazenwadel was the buildings engineer and Ross Bolden was the Electrical Engineer. This was a small team given the scale of the project and work to be done, but they were long time Engineers from Telecomm Australia days, who were well versed in what needed to be done. I suspect that there had been some internal Telstra battles between the Facilities team and the new way of doing things from the System Engineering side; of which Andrew was a system manager. Thus in true ‘Yes Minister’ style I had drawn the short straw to be the external reviewer to be used to overturn an entrenched position between two competing sides. Although in general, the engineering of individual items couldn’t be faulted, the systems side left some room for improvement. The means to do this was to expose the weakest point, and this was Requirements flow down to the site facilities. This was like looking for opal in the outback; you know it is there somewhere but actually pinpointing the exact seam, where the water has trickled down from the surface through cracks in the earth is guess work, and requires a lot of earth moving. Thus the Requirements were at the top levels but very little work had been done in assigning these to the lower levels. This is what I put in my report, giving some examples. Jim Dunlop had in the meantime been replaced as manager, Telstra could be pretty brutal in the form of Bob De Boer the Project Director; and Rod Cunningham was given the job. So the first reaction of a bureaucratic organisation under scrutiny; which I recognised immediately, having been a member of the Civil Service in the Post Office Telephone Engineering Dept., was to undermine the evidence. When that fails, in true ‘Sir Humphrey’ fashion, you undermine the person. I am afraid the Australians can be quite confrontational, and so after a bit of an email battle which escalated to the highest level, I was removed from the argument for an internal Telstra solution to their problem. A progressive organisation would have had me connecting the requirements to the equipment and buildings, rather than have me monitor the problem. However Telstra held no grudges, and even offered me a job, unfortunately personal circumstances meant I had to return to the UK. When I left Australia at the end of my contract in August 1995, I even received a letter of thanks for the work that I had undertaken on their behalf. John Whittingham GMSPL HF Division Contracts Manager told me at the time, that it was the only one thing that the Company had done right in Telstra’s eyes. A couple of years after I came back to the UK, Rod Cunningham and his wife came to see me when they were in the country on holiday, to say that there was nothing personal in the battle.
The subject of adiabatic noise came to the fore when Telstra decided to save money by amalgamating the Diesel Generator Building with the TX Building. On most military installations these are usually kept separate for fire, noise, pollution, smell, heat, electrical interference and security considerations. Can’t remember the number of main generators, but as you can imagine there was an awful lot of power required to service all the Transmitters and Air Conditioning. My own opinion is that the Commonwealth of Australia should have built solar farms near the sites, and then they could have at least run the domestic (and the beer cooler) and office facilities from these, and perhaps some of the equipment when not on full power. In the long run that would have saved them more money and would have provided a better environmental payback; instead of shipping tons of diesel to the outback.
The question of vibration and noise to the whole structure was raised as to the effect on the Transmitters’ electronic circuitry. This led to an upgrading of the Generators’ mounting suspension and dampening; and a separation of the Generators’ mounting slab from the TX slab within the building. Another issue identified at the same time by GMCSL was interference from the electronic sparking caused by the pantographs on the passing trains at New Street.
However I am not sure whether adiabatic noise is the correct definition of the process that was happening, but was the description that was used at the time. The actual mechanism of transfer of vibration/noise into the electronic circuitry was not defined either. Whether this was Gaussian noise or White Noise or any of the other coloured noises that that can exist was not defined either. Nor was the exact part of the Transmitter affected specified and whether the problem was causing an effect on the atomic structure of the components was also not specified.
Obviously GMCSL were not going to parade this problem.
I should say that I haven’t been to any of the Longreach or Laverton TX & RX sites. I have been to the TX and RX sites of the RAAF 1RSU at Alice Springs. I was sent there with a Telstra engineer, I think in 1993, after I had been to DSTO in Salisbury, Adelaide with Terry Soame. This was an assessment of a job for which GMSPL HF Division and Telstra wanted to bid. Our host was Squadron Leader Graeme Meyer who eventually worked in GMSPL HF Division.
The Telstra Installation Design Department was based in Adelaide and consisted of Rod Cunningham who was the Manager, Rick Battilana, Mark Borgas and Elmer Varga. In January 1994 I came to the UK with them to visit the Design Authorities in Marconi Radar and GEC Marconi Communications Companies. The visit was repeated in December 1994 for an update on the design progress.
On my return to the UK in August 1995 I assisted Bob Todd in producing Interface specifications. I then started work as the JORN PCTA Manager within the Systems Engineering Dept., setting up the infrastructure for testing JORN equipment at Elettra House. Chris Saywell from Field Services was the technician who assisted, before being sent to Turkey. Ron MeGee from the Production Department came to assist. John Crozier who was the Carpenter from the Company's Maintenance Department, worked building a large plinth for the RRB racks in which we were testing the RX equipment. He couldn't have been more accommodating to the whims and changes of design that we had to go through to get the right pressure and flow of cooling air from the gash old fans that we had liberated from someone else.
Air Commodore Max Brennan, Director General JORN Project, came in September 1995 to open the JORN PCTA at Elettra House.
A HPA TX was installed by Nick Richards, Chris Lodge and Jim Waddell in the JORN PCTA at Elettra House. Although we were near the main railway line, we were obviously not as close as at New Street. Also as we had RX Equipment in the near vicinity, we built a large Faraday cage around the whole TX, which was effectively a room within the main room that was isolated. Chris Lodge tested the emission environment, and I think we were satisfied with the solution that we had installed. Thus we didn’t suffer from the problems that have already been mentioned.
In 1996 the JORN contract was amended and GEC-Marconi Projects (Overseas) took on additional responsibility for the implementation of more of the hardware. From this change I was given the design for the fitting out of the Qty.60 Receive Site Bunkers. This was within the reorganised Sub system Prototyping team, initially run by Alan Batchelor, and then replaced by Kevin Bishop.
The RX Bunker internal design was refined using the Prototype Bunker at Elettra House. This was fitted out and built by Mick Worby under the instruction and guidance of myself and GMCSL IDO. I remember the problems I had with the internal design of the Bunker in meeting the signal to noise figures, and providing isolation for the GMCSL RXs. At the time I was reporting to Anthony Lysiak in GMCSL. Most of the equipment in the Bunker worked on DC to keep the interference levels down. The Bunker Control Data Distribution (BCDD) provided control of the RXs, and the Bunker Power Supply provided DC power. The figure for the thermal noise threshold of -128 dbm seems to be in the region that we were trying to obtain in the design of not only the RXs but inside the RX Bunker as well. The RXs were part of a system environment, and so there was no point in achieving this figure for the RXs alone, without providing that environment. Thus the screening for the RXs and the special testing of cable; since the choice of cable was extremely limited as to what would meet the requirement; plus having the flexibility for termination in a cramped installation. There was separate cable trunking installed for the LO cables, from that for the power cabling.
The temperature of the internal RX Bunker was also critical in this equation, and two air conditioning units were installed in their own compartments of the Bunker structure as supplied by Telstra. We had only one air conditioning unit at Elettra House. The air intake for the bunker was in the form of a fibre glass chimney, to maintain a low metal profile and avoid spurious reflections on the RX Sites.
Unfortunately, GMSPL HF Division Systems Engineering and Telstra Systems Engineering, between them had failed, through Requirements Analysis and Specification, to provide a means of distributing the DC to the BCDD, LO System and RXs, plus other equipment. Nor was there a system for earthing and shielding, EMC & EMI seemed to have been forgotten in the bickering between the two. There was also no alarm mechanism for display. So, I had to design a Unit for DC Power Distribution, fusing and alarms. This was not called a Unit, but a Panel, otherwise it would have required the full JORN treatment. Since the Panel was not signalled as a Configuration Item (CI) it was not given a JORN Identification No., and thus was not subject to the involvement of ILS for MTBF, MTTR, etc. All the other gobble-dy-gook of Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled (C/SCSC - Cost / Schedule Control System Criteria); Requirements Analysis; Requirement, Functional and Test Specifications; plus reviews by layers of management, who spouted loads of wonderful meaningless words, and added little value, were all circumvented. Half a dozen drawings, knocked up in a week through the GMCSL IDO, soon had production underway. The Form, Fit and Function of the Unit was effectively hidden amongst all the drawings for the Bunker. Luckily the management of GMSPL HF Division were either too embarrassed to create any waves; or more likely they hadn’t even noticed. Although I seem to remember that I received a complaint that I hadn’t used the main Design Office for the Bunker design; which would have cost twice as much and taken twice as long.
With respect to the RXs, a Faraday cage with mounting back plate had to be built for each of the 20 RXs in the 20 Bunkers behind each RX array. We were effectively taking ‘off the shelf’ equipment and upgrading its performance through external protection. Afterall, no one serious about EMI / EMC puts D Type connectors on their equipment. The Production Bunker shell was manufactured for Telstra by a Company in South Australia, to drawings that had no internal dimension tolerances. A request to visit and measure the internal dimensions and fixings of the Production Bunker was rejected by the GMSPL HF Division management in Melbourne. The RX mountings therefore had to be designed in cyberspace on a three-dimensional frame along three walls, using the Prototype Bunker. By sheer luck the design was a couple of millimetres out for the difference between the Production and Prototype Bunkers, The problem was overcome by placing washers between the front face of the mounting frames and Bunker mounting bars.
The Cable Entry Panel for each Bunker was designed with lightning protection, a waveguide beyond cut-off, RFI filtering and gaskets to withstand a nuclear war. The gaskets had to remove the slight bending and rippling of the external surface of the Bunkers and the flatness of the Cable Entry Panels. The original intention was to keep the design of the Qty 60 Panels the same, but a change in the Local Oscillator system forced the design of different editions of panels subject to where they were positioned in the chain behind the RX array. There was a sun shield fitted above the Cable Entry Panel to minimise the degradation of the cables outer sheathing from the sun’s infra-red and ultra violet rays.
The Times LMR cable that was used within the Bunker I had specially tested by GEC Marconi Baddow Laboratory, to ensure it would meet the insulation and isolation requirements. Accurate phasing of the different cable lengths, caused by equipment positioning, had to be calculated and built into the provision of the drawings. I think Qty.30 Kilometres of cable was ordered by John Taylor in Melbourne.
The RX Bunkers internal design went into production, after I had visited GMSPL Sydney Factory for a week in June 1997; and meeting with John Taylor from Melbourne and Ralph Bellamy from GMSPL Sydney Factory Production. Following which I continued to support the design when back in the UK.
I moved on as the JORN Melbourne Integration Facility (MIF) Design Team Leader from December 1997 - July 1998. This job was as the Team Leader for the Company response to meet Milestones 1 & 2 of the MIF contract. Generation and provision of system interconnection design and installation data for the Tx, Rx, Tx FMS, Rx FMS, Rx ATE (Automatic Test Equipment) sub-systems & associated sub-systems within the Rx Bunker. The outcome was to put together a package of files (Qty 23) for RLM, of a hardware design for the Melbourne Integration Facility. In total there were Qty 69 Lever Arch files, one package to GMSPL HF Division, one to RLM , one to ourselves in Chelmsford. The design was like a JORN PCTA at Elettra House but in more detail and much bigger to cover the complete system. The resultant delivery of Qty 69 folders of data was to schedule, although against tight timescales. This achievement was recognised by the presentation of an ICAS (Individual Company Award System) award.
From August 1998 - Sept.1998 I was the Team Leader, with Peter Shelley, in Elettra House responsible for building the four Rx Frequency Management Systems hardware test systems, FMS Ionosondes Equipment, to meet programme milestones. Followed by the commissioning of the sub-systems, involving hardware fault diagnosis, analysis and repair, and software build verification. At this time RLM Engineers started to appear at the Elettra JORN PCTA before they moved onto Australia.
My last job on JORN was as a RRB Integration and Test Engineer from October 1998 - January 1999, in the RRB (Receive Radar Building) Integration and Test team with Dave Walters and Nigel Thackray. Utilising the hardware test systems, and then the RX Building VME Bin software testing, we carried out regression testing and verification of software builds to meet the milestones for the various RRB sub-systems. The software builds were carried out by the team working for Bruce Hood. The mathematics for the algorithms were carried out by Adam Maclean.
The design at Phase 3 of the JORN Project that we passed on to RLM was far nearer completion as a working entity than our management wanted to recognise. The GEC Management no longer wanted to play on JORN, and bought themselves out of the contract. What frightened them was the potential cost of the overall system software development. The Marconi Radar Projects Company had been so hollowed out in depth by the Bean Counters extracting the last pip, there was no longer any engineering capability left. It was a mere shadow of the IUKADGE days. However this decision was expedient for both sides, as the Australian Government DOD and Telstra, as main contractor, could use this to divert attention away from their joint failure, by the blame culture of bashing the POMS, and letting the American Cavalry come to the rescue and pay for the system. One example of the disinformation can be seen on the JORN Wikipedia site, where it states that GEC Marconi did not have the experience for software development. This is patently wrong given the Company’s involvement in large MOD turnkey contracts over the years. What this should say is that the Company did not have the present capability, nor the willingness to take on this job, and the contract risk assessment review had shown that the Company had extracted what it wanted from the JORN contract. Its experience of previous software contracts showed it was time to pull up the stumps.
I understand RLM (Lockheed Martin Tenix) at Phase 4 of the JORN Project put together a complete software bureau in South Australia which developed the overall software, and maintained JORN. It’s wonderful what can be achieved with limitless resources. This is now carried out by BAE Systems (Australia) as Phase 6 of the JORN development and update is carried out.
At the termination of the Marconi Projects JORN contract in January 1999, having worked on the JORN Project for seven and a half years, our names went on a list for redeployment or scrap. Luckily I finished on a Friday and started work on the Monday for Ray Wombwell, who was Systems Manager on 743D for the Greek Pilion Radar.