Wanderer, there is no path, you make the path by… mounting radars

"Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking the road is made, and on looking back one sees the path that must never be trodden again. Wanderer, there is no road, only wakes upon the sea." Antonio Machado

Installing radars is a virile, heroic pursuit. It's not scientific knowledge, nor technical either — you don't need to be an expert at repairing radars, it only takes skill, thoroughness, good physical shape, and plenty of nerve. The whole time you're walking along the edge of a cliff; any mistake can kill you. Nobody ever trained us for this, we learned on our own. It's the classic case of "you learn to castrate by pulling out balls first." Still, a few things had indeed been taught to me, and they contributed greatly to the expertise we boast of today. Probably it all began in 1981, when the advisor to the Laboratorio Conjunto Soviético Cubano para la Meteorología Tropical (Soviet-Cuban Joint Laboratory for Tropical Meteorology), engineer Román Pávlovich Tychina, came to Camagüey to receive the first MRL-5 radar installed in Cuba, and found that the stars had finally aligned: at the Centro Meteorológico de Camagüey two things he had long wished for came together — a university graduate with an electrical background had turned up and, by sheer chance and good fortune, he spoke Russian. I was far from imagining that this was the start of a saga that would turn us into experts at installing radars, and doing so across different parts of Cuba and the world. As my suspicious readers will have gathered, that "someone who turned up" was me; but before telling you this story I have to go back a little in the timeline…

How the Steel Was Tempered

The moment I met Tychina at the handover/reception of the MRL-5 radar, I was buried in learning, with another Soviet advisor, the workings of the Meteorit-2 (RMS-2) upper-air sounding radar, alongside the monster Maroto, so I didn't pay much attention to the MRL-5 radar handover or to Tychina; but he immediately had other plans for me. Roman P. Tychina had arrived in Cuba in 1979 tasked with modernizing an old ARS-3 radar, which the USSR's State Committee for Hydrometeorology had donated to Cuba in 1966 and which had been installed at the fledgling Camagüey Meteorological Center. These radars were built for weather applications out of war surplus radars. In this case it was a SON-4 artillery-guidance set from 1957, modified to pick up weather targets.

In 1982 the Joint Laboratory was gearing up to start a long series of weather-modification experiments and needed a radar with better performance than the old ARS-3 for running the induced-rain work. By the time I started working, that task had already been finished — Tychina had already built up the ARS-3M and needed someone to pass on the knowledge of every modification he'd made to the radar. Stomping on modesty (a phrase stolen from a journalist), I can tell my readers that Tychina couldn't have found anyone better, not because I was especially smart, and even less because I knew anything about radars, but because I found it fascinating. Tychina was very given to explaining, but I was even more given to asking questions and soaking things up. Without meaning to, Tychina gave me every tool and skill for making modifications, taking apart and reassembling a radar's circuits and parts, and documenting all of it to a high professional standard and with great thoroughness, and he pushed me to do it.

While we didn't make many modifications to the ARS-3M radar (though it served me as an excellent example and study material), the new MRL-5 radar got thousands of them (well, my readers already know I exaggerate) — it was a new radar both for me, for whom everything was new, and for Tychina, who was very experienced. This radar was excellent ground for innovation. Tychina and I made a very good pair: I'd come up with things (99 useless for every 1 useful one) and Tychina would teach me how to implement them on the radar. He patiently taught me to handle every kind of tool and mercilessly corrected my botched jobs while making sure I mastered the theory too (which was homework).

I thought I was pretty good once Tychina left; but it's like video games: along came Vilory Petrovich Kravtchenko, the new advisor, and it was like suddenly jumping to a much higher level of the game. Kravtchenko's most encouraging line about my work was: "that thing you did makes me want to throw up." But as in every game, you play and play until you're worn out, until you manage to master the new level. My innovations grew ever more complicated and my level of execution grew ever more sophisticated, until you could no longer tell a wiring job, a solder joint, or a modification made by me apart from the factory originals… so as not to make anyone throw up. My old Soviet advisors were astonished to learn of our achievements — they hadn't figured I'd ever turn into anyone useful, since I was a slow learner.

I'm always doing things I don't know how to do — that's how I get them done

In 1988, with no Soviet advisors left, we built the novel HERMES system. In 1993 we designed and brought online the ARGOS system, which allowed switching between manual command-and-processing and computerized command-and-processing — with that we put ourselves on par with the best that had been done anywhere in the world in weather radar automation. All of that required numerous modifications to the original MRL-5, all of them carried out to a high technical standard. We were ready for bigger undertakings. Neither short on nerve nor lazy, in 1994 we had the audacity to ask the director of the Instituto de Meteorologia (Cuba's Meteorological Institute) to let us install the new MRL-5 radar in the new building at Loma de la Mula. I don't know whether Dr. Fabio Fajardo Moros (INSMET's director at the time) wore the same size straitjacket we did, or whether he just liked placing big bets on innovation, or whether there simply wasn't anything better on the horizon — either way, he said yes, and the history of radar in Cuba took a new turn.

Wherever the mule falls, that's where you whip it

We were already the Technical Development Laboratory; when in 1995, unfortunately for me, Waldo and Ramoncito, my two solid pillars, founders of LADETEC, were discharged. It was a very complicated situation because we had designed numerous modifications and innovations that had been planned for this radar, and now I would no longer have the two of them, the architects of everything we'd designed. It fell to me to face the assembly of a radar from scratch, pulling the modules out of their crates, with very scarce resources to implement all the new designs, and with a very young staff still untested under fire. It's hard, knowing Arturo, Roberto, Leonardo, Albio, Rafael, Arencibia, Alexey and Marco as they are today, to think that at some point they weren't the super specialists they are now; but back then they were young and inexperienced when it came to assembling a radar. Mounting the antenna and the radome were also new to me, and to be frank,  I myself strongly doubted whether we could pull it off or not; but I was very careful not to show it in front of my loyal, green colleagues who trusted my expertise blindly.

Skills and quality standards aren't picked up in a couple of days. I designed the cables (on the computer, which was at the Camagüey Meteorological Center), trading off with Marco who was programming on the same computer, and my colleagues went about installing them just as fast as I sent them the cable specs for the hill. When I got to the assembly site on the hill, to check on the cables for the first time, I saw with dismay that one cable had come up short, and the conductors were soldered correctly at the terminals, but were left stretched taut, giving a horrible impression. In front of my terrified colleagues, I grabbed a pair of cutting pliers and snipped them off. The terror was because we were desperately short on time, the inauguration already had a fixed date (April 4th); but if I tolerated a shoddy job, we'd be bunglers for life (like the Czech cartoon bunglers). This time I had to play the bitter role of Kravtchenko. I told them calmly –we pull the cable, we redo it to the required length, and we'll leave this control panel as pretty as a photo of Marilyn Monroe in a bikini, not that ugly thing "that would make Kravtchenko want to throw up." The rest is well-known history, we inaugurated the radar a day early, on April 3rd (because Rosa Elena moved it up), and we became true experts at assembling a complete radar without the manufacturer's guidance — after all, you've got to start with the first one, right?

Multiplying loaves and fishes…sorry, modernized radars

Then, between 2000 and 2005, came the teardowns/rebuilds of all the wiring on the radars at Pico San Juan (2000), Casa Blanca (2001), Punta del Este (2002) and La Bajada (2005). The general director of the Instituto de Meteorologia (Cuba's national weather service), Tomás Gutiérrez, who had backed us body and soul ever since he saw the modernization-automation-installation of the Loma de la Mula radar finished, had never seen the teardown/rebuild process for modernizing a radar until we did it on his own radar at Loma de Casa Blanca. A few days after we started the teardown, Tomás went up to the radar, which sits on top of the headquarters building. When he saw "that," he said — now the radar's really screwed, there's no human way you're going to put that back together and have it work again! And he had a point — we'd pulled every cable out of its raceway, and most of them lay there on the floor, cut up and scattered. Tomás only calmed down the morning after a night when, before turning in at dawn, we'd left the printed image from the Casa Blanca radar at his office door, and next to it, corroborating it, the image from the Cayo Hueso radar showing the weather situation at that same moment — because, as the saying goes, "seeing is believing." Less than a month had gone by. Yes, by then we were a well-drilled team, working with optimal coordination and timing on radar installs and teardowns.

A descamisado (shirtless one — a term for the poor/dispossessed, from the 1993 book of that name) heads to paradise

On none of the 4 radars we'd modernized by early 2005 (Pico San Juan, Casa Blanca, Punta del Este and La Bajada) did we ever have to take down the dome or the antenna tower. That's where things stood when an important event came up. Since 2004 the northern part of the country's eastern region had been under an intense drought. In 2005 the Cuban State decided to open a Cloud Seeding Program to ease the situation. We were about to receive a METEOR 1500 S radar, brand new, still in its crate. The trouble was that the German manufacturer hadn't set up an installation (in Cuba), and we didn't have a site ready to put it on.

Installing it ourselves was, honestly, a huge challenge, because while we already had experience, ours were radars we knew inside and out — the METEOR 1500 S, on the other hand, was a total unknown. My engineers, fresh off the road from modernizing and automating the La Bajada radar, headed straight on to Holguín; but that already deserves its own story — a lot of interesting things happened.

The story is short: in 2 months and 10 days the radar was up and running, an absolute record build time for the civil works, assembly, and commissioning, for that type of radar, and it went up on Loma El Paraíso. The Germans never got tired of praising us. The greatest credit, in my opinion, went to monster Leonardo, one of the best radar assembler-integrator-repairer-designers in the whole world (and mind you, excellence at all four of those tasks at once doesn't happen in any human being), without taking anything away from my other engineers, who also turned in a tremendous job, nor from our Venezuelan colleagues, nor from the IACC folks, nor from all the institutions in the province. The skill shown in assembling this radar put us straight on the world map of radar engineering.

Dennis the «contrary one»«

That same year, 2005, still had more surprises waiting for us. In early June I'd checked with Rubiera on whether weather conditions would let us take apart the Camagüey radar in July, to rebuild it into its industrial version –The numerical forecast models don't show anything on the horizon, July isn't very hurricane-prone –Rubiera told me. So there we were, in early July, upgrading the Camagüey radar, when Dennis showed up. With the radar half taken apart, we had only one day to rig up a hybrid circuitry (between the industrial version we were installing and the prototype we were dismantling, since it had already clocked 8 years as a "proof of concept"). Some kind of emergency fix that would let the Camagüey radar track this hurricane…and we pulled it off. As almost always, it fell to us to work under extreme pressure.

Dennis the "barbarian"

And meanwhile, while we were getting the Camagüey radar up and running, hurricane Dennis the Barbarian was wrecking the Pilón radar, which hadn't been automated yet. The antenna's protective radome blew apart into a thousand pieces. Luckily, at the Camagüey Meteorological Center we still had the radome from the old MRL-5 radar, the first one installed back in 1981. The idea was to take it apart in Camagüey and haul it to Pilón for mounting; but the engineers were busy finishing up the modernization of the Camagüey radar (interrupted by the cyclone) and getting ready for Gran Piedra's and Pilón's own, on top of the work of bringing the new Holguín radar online within Cuba's radar network. So things stood, and the "monster" Rafael, who'd pitched in as just another engineer on the Camagüey install back in 1997, volunteered to go do the job alongside the tough guys at Pilón. Rafael set off for Pilón with the disassembled radome only 7 days after Dennis passed through.

As I said at the start, mounting the antenna and dome is rough, harsh, nasty, and dangerous work. Rafael remembers "the ninja" Vladimir, the Pilón radar operator, rappelling down tied by a rope around his waist from a small crane some soldiers had lent (yes, no basket or cage like you'd normally use for this) on the outside, while he, up on a scaffold, screwed the nuts onto the bolts from the inside (the ones Vladimir was holding from outside), all while fiberglass debris rained down on him causing unbearable itching. The heat, the itching, the height, the up-and-down… exhausting. A whole epic (yes, I know I keep using that word; but I can't find a better one) that involved this radar's operators, led by the "monster" Dennis (not the hurricane, the radar chief, same name). A few months later we modernized the Pilón radar with automatic, remote control and a reduced circuitry. From that point on, the Pilón radar, under Dennis's spot-on and innovative leadership, became a model of effectiveness and reliability in Cuba's weather radar network.

Take your chocolate and pay what you owe

In 2012 we finally pulled off, after a long obstacle course imposed on us by the blockade and other stumbles, the task we'd been handed: designing and building a radar prototype for service and research at the Instituto de Meteorologia (Cuban Meteorology Institute), with Doppler capability. In other articles I've written plenty about this radar (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). In this article I'll stick to talking about the fabrication and assembly work.

It was decided that this radar prototype would be mounted on "the ironwork" of the MRL-5M radar, which had been installed on Loma de la Mula (the Mula Hill); but that it would be installed again on the grounds of the Centro Meteorologico de Camaguey (Camaguey Weather Center), where the first MRL-5 radar had once stood. So this meant disassembling it on the hill and moving it to the center, where it was mounted on a concrete tower built for the purpose. Disassembling/reassembling the antenna system on Loma de la Mula, and especially the radome — which by then had 15 years of exposure to the weather's mercies and 22 years since it was built — was quite an adventure in itself. After much deliberation, the decision was made to move it fully assembled, because the fiberglass it's made of was already fairly scorched and would surely not tolerate being taken apart into petals. The move was made with one of those trucks Cubans call "zorras" (flatbed trailers). Every pothole on the rough road between the radar's position on Loma de la Mula and the Weather Center gave the crew a near heart attack. Beyond how grueling the procedure was, we were gripped by the anguish of knowing there'd be no replacement if it broke. The future of our "creature," the Doppler radar, hinged on the skill and care with which it was done.

Another task no less important for getting this radar running was building the new radar tower at the Camaguey Weather Center. The monster Albio served as chief architect-builder, seconded by monster Leonardo (Ichi to those close to him, and to those not so close). My engineers worked as builders, riggers, masons, welders (both arc and oxy-acetylene), carpenters, and whatever other trades and specialties were needed so the structure would live up to the radar it was going to house. Quite the technological feat in a field that has nothing to do with our specialty of weather radars.

The radar itself was a major challenge, because of the Doppler requirement and because of the delays and cost overruns caused by the blockade against Cuba for this kind of technology which, though meant for peaceful uses, shakes hands with military technologies. Remember that this is a radar Doppler on both wavelengths, that is, on the S-band (10 cm) and X-band (3 cm) channels, which must work simultaneously using a single antenna, like the original MRL-5 radar; but with the added difficulty of the Doppler mode. This is a one-of-a-kind unit in the world today. Dual-wavelength design is already falling out of use, given how expensive it would be to build from scratch. In addition, both wavelengths are radiated with polarization orthogonal to each other.

The ability to design a radar with all its electronic circuitry and all its software applications is something that puts us among the very select working teams in the world capable of doing so, an elite that numbers no more than 10 institutions. However, designing is one thing, and building it and getting it running in practice is quite another. Keep in mind that LADETEC has never had more than 10 specialists, and that besides designing and building a radar, on a very tight budget, its specialists also carried on their shoulders the responsibility of keeping eight radars of the Cuban meteorological service running (hardware and software). We never had all the measuring instruments we would have liked. Nor have we ever had a machine to produce printed circuit boards for our prototypes. Almost never, for lack of available materials, can we make two identical circuits, so we always end up making prototypes and one-of-a-kind units, built by hand for lack of a machine for that purpose. For the construction of this radar, no new cabinets were bought; instead we had to use the original MRL-5 radar cabinets and fit the new circuitry into them, which was an added difficulty — like a straitjacket for our design.

The prototype of the Cuban Weather Radar (Doppler) has been running successfully since August 13, 2012. It was christened RD-200SX.

A güegüense (trickster figure from a Nicaraguan satirical folk drama) goes to the clouds

In 2014 a new surprise came our way. The Instituto Nicaragüense de Aeronáutica Civil (Nicaraguan Civil Aeronautics Institute) got financing from COCESNA to buy a radar for the Managua airport. The Nicas went to the US to get advice from NOAA. In Boston, someone showed them Rinehart's book, translated by me, and told them —these are the people (pointing at my photo on the back cover) you need to look for, you're friends of the Cubans. We were in it from the same bidding process that SELEX (former Gematronik) won, and we gave advisory support up to a year after the radar went into operation.

Already a very experienced installer by 2014, Leonardo took charge of the entire installation of a METEOR 735 C radar at the Las Nubes site in Nicaragua, with minimal involvement from the manufacturer. The training that the manufacturer normally gives on site, SELEX handed over to Leonardo for the hardware side and to Roberto for the software side. The factory courses were taught by Arturo and Rafael in Germany.

I was the one who handled the acceptance tests in Germany (Factory Acceptance Test) and advised on the contract signing, and Leonardo handled the on-site acceptance tests (Site Acceptance Test). Nothing like it had ever been seen before — both the manufacturer and the buyer had us, both, as advisors-facilitators, and it worked out for the good of the team and of those who were going to operate it. Spanish was key throughout the whole process, and so was the trust they had in us — both the manufacturer, before whom Arturo, Roberto, and Leonardo had successfully certified back in 2010 (with the positive track record of the incredible installation in Holguín), and the Nicaraguans, who had the chance to see us in action during the install. All my engineers passed through Nicaragua over the course of a year giving post-sale support. That's how we built a solid international reputation.

One who's going to the Cristo de Casa Blanca to pay off a promise

The prototype of the Cuban (Doppler) Weather Radar should really have been built at Loma de Casa Blanca, home to the national headquarters of the Instituto de Meteorología (Cuban Meteorological Institute), but the logistics were too much of a headache for our group, LADETEC, based in Camagüey, to design and build the prototype 560 km from our “headquarters.” We had that debt pending, so the first series unit had to be assembled, without fail, right there in Casa Blanca. The pandemic, and the ever-present blockade, got in the way of this plan — but they couldn't cancel it. In 2018 the first modifications were made, and we were left waiting for some key components to arrive. While we made no changes to the radar antenna itself (only to the electric drive system), we did have to patch up the radome, because holes had opened up from the salt-laden bay wind scouring it.

In October–November 2020, disregarding the epidemiological risk at a peak moment of COVID-19 in the capital, the final push was carried out, and unit zero of the series of Cuban weather radars was inaugurated on November 11 of that year. Unlike the prototype, which was mounted in the original MRL-5 radar cabinets, the Casa Blanca unit was mounted in cabinets bought to LADETEC's own design. The cabinets were assembled and fine-tuned in Camagüey to minimize time spent in Casa Blanca, given the adverse epidemiological conditions. As the monster Olano put it — this one no longer has anything to do with the MRL-5 radar, this is your own creation.

Paradise to the rhythm of a Cuban conga

In 2011 the Holguín radar stopped working because the manufacturer's original control system collapsed. It wasn't until 2017 that we managed to find an innovative solution to get it running again: the Cuban VESTA|RDA control system was modified to work with the PROFIBUS modules used by the original control system, without making any changes to the radar that couldn't be reverted if the decision were made to go back to the German version. In doing this, the radar did start running again, but it lost the ability to estimate wind velocity (Doppler mode), because we had no access to the ASPEN DRX Doppler processor, which was in fact working, but with a communication protocol proprietary to the manufacturer and unknown to us.

Between October 2021 and January 2022, right in the middle of a COVID-19 outbreak no less, LADETEC carried the innovative process through to the end and added to this radar the Cuban digital receiver-signal processor VESTA|Cíclope, previously installed on the Camagüey and Casa Blanca radars. The Holguín radar returned to its Doppler operating mode. All the changes made are reversible, and the radar can go back to having the manufacturer's original controller and processor if that's ever decided. That made the design and installation extraordinarily complicated — gutting it and building fresh would have been simpler. Transmitter, receiver, and antenna remain the manufacturer's originals (which are excellently made). Unlike the other Cuban radars, this one is a klystron radar with a sophisticated dual-conversion intermediate-frequency receiver, and that was kept in the Cuban modification. The 6.4-meter-diameter antenna is the largest of the 8 Cuban radars, and it's the one we'd want for our Cuban Weather Radar design.

And one bound for Isla Hermosa (the "Beautiful Island")

In 2022, Leonardo, Roberto, and Arturo got an unusual proposal: assemble a radar's modules (without commissioning or handover of the radar) in a very distant, little-known country. Mounting a 9-meter-diameter antenna (the exact same one used on the American WSR-88DP radars) on a 34-meter-tall tower, 2 meters above sea level, is no small feat, and to top it off, at the antipodes. The heat, the humidity, the altitude, the many logistical difficulties and delays, the pandemic, the heavy blocks that made up the radome… a puzzle that was hard to put together. A very risky, exhausting job. I felt very proud of the mastery and skill my colleagues poured into it.

As I was saying, knowing how to install doesn't require specific radar knowledge — it's a skill you pick up… by installing radars. I'll let my reader draw their own conclusions on that one. LADETEC is capable of taking on industrial installations of any kind of equipment; radars are the most complicated thing we've run into.

So, Damnatio memoriae? Or apotheosis?