Oddball Military electronics teardown - A radar / radio operator control panel type thing...

Описание: As part of some of the avionics and military surplus things I got off eBay for teardown, this week I have an Operator Control Panel thing which appears to be one of several channel select control panels for a radar or communication system. This seems to have previously operated by Aquila Sealand who do the air traffic control for the MOD so it gives some idea what it was for.

The NATO stock number suggests it is definitely a part for a radar system too and was manufactured by PYE Telecom (now Philips) and, going by the other items from the seller he seems to be selling various parts from this larger system. It also seems to have been used by the US military as well going by the NATO / National stock number database.

EDIT: after a bit of digging this appears to be removed due to the "Project Marshall" upgrade which is a joint venture between NATS and Thales; more information is available by just searching for "project Marshall upgrade Aquila" on Google. Basically in a nutshell the MOD's air traffic management systems were replaced back in 2014-2015 with more modern equipment and this unit is part of the old obsolete systems which have been scrapped. In 2022 an article revealed the new system wasn't quite up to scratch and massively overbudget.

I've not been able to find any information on this thing or the particular system it came from so if anyone does know or recognise it please comment down below. Going by the date codes on the chips it was manufactured in the early 1990's. Looking at similar items from the eBay seller the same CPU board and backplane are used in all the other types of control panels; just the front panel differs and the microcontroller firmware. Explains all the unused connectors I found on the backplane; it's a universal part along with the main CPU board.

Also going by the number of LED's and the MM5450 chips, only one of these were actually used in this item. The others are not connected to anything and each chip can drive 34 LED's. There's not that many on this unit. Guess it was cheaper to use a universal CPU board for everything. These things won't be mass produced and would have been made in small numbers.

Parts wise, it is useful for spares as it contains some useful (but not valuable) LED display driver IC's and a standard 24x2 HD44780 LCD plus some good quality key switches. The microcontroller is One Time Programmable so that is not useable and is only for scrap.

Royal Air Force recruitment web page for Air Traffic Controller showing these panels in use https://recruitment.raf.mod.uk/roles/...

Royal Air Force video showing the units in operation    • RAF_ATC  

UK government press article https://www.gov.uk/government/news/15...