The antenna pointing system for West Ford

The West Ford experiment required that two geographically distant narrow-beam antennas be directed at a common volume of the dipole belt, and that computer-generated data be used to point these antennas without recourse to closed-loop autotracking. It was necessary that the antennas could be directed at fixed belt latitudes, at moving points on the belt, or at other constrained loci. For the two antenna sites, special-purpose digital equipment was designed to accept pointing data from punched paper tape and to interpolate between data points in order to obtain smooth antenna motion. This equipment also permitted superposition of manual handwheel corrections on computer-generated data. The punched paper tapes were produced by a sophisticated programming system for the Lincoln Laboratory IBM 7090/94 computer. The program system also permitted convenient experiment planning, direction of the antennas to other objects such as the moon, and preparation of pointing data for non-Lincoln users.