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Down the hole on fighter control.

We soon nicknamed our brand new R3 bunker 'the hole'. It was a more friendly, less formal, name for it, or so we thought. After working in it for a while, the rumour went round that some of our number had grown an increased amount of body hair on their backs arising from our new troglodytic life-style!
The coverage of the new Type 80 search radar was vastly superior to the old Types 14 and 15. The performance of our new Type 13 height finding radars, with which we were already familiar, remained the same, but we were now able to use their full range and height potential. These radars complemented each other very well.
The new radar picture, as displayed on the PPIs, was far clearer, and the paints were sharper, with more precise definition. We were now able to pick out individual aircraft flying in loose formation. The range was far superior, to the point that we could see, at 50,000 feet (the assumed maximum combat altitude), in a clockwise direction from the north, well into Denmark, some of the Baltic Sea, just past Stettin across the Polish border, round to well past Prague into Czechoslovakia, just to the Austrian and Swiss borders with Germany, over Basel including the Black Forest, and continuing round to cover eastern France, almost the whole of Belgium, and all of Holland. We could off-centre and adjust our view of any of this area so as to look at any one part in much closer definition. It was claimed that, at higher altitude, the coverage extended over the UK coast and as far as Warsaw to the east but we, at Auenhausen, had no way of proving it. Our coverage at lower altitudes was, as ever, limited by our straight line radar horizon over the curving surface of the earth.
In mentioning the radar horizon, there were rare times, usually early in a morning, that we experienced what we called 'anoprop' or, to give it its proper title, anomalous propagation. This was caused by a temperature inversion in the lower atmosphere. It effectively split our radar beam so that a part of it hugged the surface of the earth. In these conditions it was possible to see, many miles away, such things as radio masts and tall buildings. On several occasions I was able to identify the wireless masts on the north German coast and the tower of Jever Schloss, the locations of all of which I knew well. When this happened I would normally tell the Senior Technical Officer of the watch so that, if necessary, he could micro-adjust the position of the video-map display on our PPIs. It was unusual for anoprop to last long, maybe only an hour or so.
We could see cloud and heavy precipitation as on almost all centimetric radars, but we now had ECM equipment which could reduce this interference and enable us to see aircraft through it.1 Our Permanent Echoes (reflections from local high ground and nearby fixed edifices) were, because of our higher position, much less in area than at the old tech site. We also had the advantage of more effective IFF equipment. This enabled us quickly to identify any aircraft allocated to us for control or other purposes.
It took a while for us to acclimatise to our new working environment and equipment. Although the fighter control task remained entirely unchanged it was now made much easier. With eight potential control positions, and our increased radar coverage, the number of aircraft allocated to us for PIs and other activities increased enormously.
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1 ECM = Electronic Counter Measures. This, in effect, was sophisticated anti-jamming equipment which enabled us to counter both interference and potentially hostile jamming of various sorts.
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