Comment by Animats
That's a strange machine. It's too bad so little is known about how it attached to the rest of the radar system. It's clearly a special purpose machine, one with manually programmed ROMs, built to do a very specific task. But what? Did it beam-steer the radar? Process the returns? The special-purpose I/O gear that must have been present is gone. The console is clearly just a programming and debug console, not something for seeing what the radar was seeing.
The US's main over the horizon radar of that era was Cobra Mist.[1] It never really worked well. Too much interference, supposedly. Trying to bounce radar off the ionosphere is inherently iffy. The US instead deployed line of sight radar chains, such as BMEWS. This required sites strung across northern Canada, but worked.
More modern over the horizon radars do work, but have much more compute power behind them.
> More modern over the horizon radars do work, but have much more compute power behind them.
Yes, and it also requires exotic clocks.
A few years ago, a story appeared about the Australian JORN over-the-horizon radar system. The University of Adelaide developed a highly precise cryogenic sapphire oscillator with jitter measured in attoseconds. The oscillator enhances radar performance by improving measurements of Doppler phase shift. They claim this oscillator is the highest precision clock yet created.
Despite all the downsides of OTH radar, it's still under active development and in the field.
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/ipas/real-world-impact/defence-s... https://spectrum.ieee.org/for-precision-the-sapphire-clock-o...