Cobra Dane Phased Array Radar on Shemya Island, from "Aerospace Power" 1977 US Air Force

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more at http://quickfound.net/links/military_news_and_links.html Overview of the Cobra Dane phased array radar on Shemya Island, in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands. 'This film covers activities in research and development tests, evaluation, and procurement during 1977.' Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Dane The AN/FPS-108 Cobra Dane radar is a passive electronically scanned array installation operated by Raytheon for the United States Air Force at Eareckson Air Station on the island of Shemya, Alaska. This radar system was built in 1976 and brought on-line in 1977 for the primary mission of intelligence gathering in support of verification of the SALT II arms limitation treaty. Its single face radar with a 29 m (95 ft) diameter phased array radar antenna 52.7373°N 174.0914°E faces the Kamchatka Peninsula and Kura Test Range. Cobra Dane operates in the 1215–1400 MHz band. The "Cobra" designation indicated a General Defense Intelligence Program. It initially employed a Control Data Corporation Cyber 74 mainframe computer for data processing. Data from the radar is sent to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. It is also listed as a partner of the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office and works with the Missile Defense Agency, under the control of the 21st Operations Group... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers (except for the Cyber 18 and Cyber 1000 minicomputers) were the primary products of Control Data Corporation (CDC) during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing. They were used for modeling fluid flow, material science stress analysis, electrochemical machining analysis, probabilistic analysis, energy and academic computing, radiation shielding modeling, and other applications... The Cyber 70 and 170 architectures were successors to the earlier CDC 6600 and CDC 7600 series and therefore shared almost all of the earlier architecture's characteristics. The Cyber-70 series was a minor upgrade from the earlier systems. The Cyber-170 series represented CDCs move from discrete electronic components and core memory to integrated circuits and semiconductor memory... The central processor (CPU) and central memory (CM) operated in units of 60-bit words. In CDC lingo, the term "byte" referred to 12-bit entities (which coincided with the word size used by the peripheral processors). Characters were six bits, operation codes were six bits, and central memory addresses were 18 bits. Central processor instructions were either 15 bits or 30 bits. The 18-bit addressing inherent to the Cyber 170 series imposed a limit of 262,144 (256K) words of main memory, which was semiconductor memory in this series. The central processor had no I/O instructions, relying upon the peripheral processor (PP) units to do I/O. A Cyber 170-series system consisted of one or two CPUs that ran at either 25 or 40 MHz, and was equipped with 10, 14, 17, or 20 peripheral processors (PP), and up to 24 high-performance channels for high-speed I/O... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shemya Shemya or Simiya (Aleut: Samiyax̂) is a small island in the Near Islands group of the Semichi Islands chain in the Aleutian Islands archipelago southwest of Alaska, at 52°43′27″N 174°07′08″ECoordinates: 52°43′27″N 174°07′08″E. It has a land area of 5.903 sq mi (15.289 km²), and is about 1,200 miles (1,900 km) southwest of Anchorage, Alaska. It is 4.39 kilometres (2.73 mi) wide and 6.95 kilometres (4.32 mi) long. The Russian vessel Saint Peter and Paul wrecked at Shemya in 1762. Most of the crew survived. A United States Air Force radar, surveillance, and weather station and aircraft refueling station, including a 10,000 ft (3 km) long runway, opened on Shemya in 1943 and is still in operation. The station, originally Shemya Air Force Base or Shemya Station, had 1,500 workers at its peak in the 1960s. Observations from Shemya were normally the first radar reports of new Russian satellite launches from Tyuratam (Baikonur) in the early days of satellite tracking; see Project Space Track. The United States Air Force airborne intelligence platforms "Cobra Ball", "Rivet Amber," and "Rivet Ball" flew intercontinental ballistic missile tracking flights from this island near the Soviet Union, especially the Kamchatka Peninsula, during the height of the Cold War...