One of the places we visited on vacation was The National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, home of The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope as well as several others. The GBT is a 100 meter dish that's able to be positioned to point at any place in the sky above 5 degrees. It's huge and it's awesome.
Because the telescopes on the property are radio telescopes and the GBT in particular is so sensitive, special restrictions are in place for the surrounding area. First, there's a huge 'National Radio Quiet Zone' covering a large part of south eastern WV and north western VA. Second, all electronic devices give off some kind of radio waves, so all cell phones and digital cameras had to be turned off once we left the main parking area of the Observatory. The picture above was taken at the max. zoom on my camera from the observation point.
One of the other restrictions that interested me was that only diesel vehicles are used on the property as the spark plugs in gasoline engines create interference. As a result, there were a fleet of neat old diesel vehicles around the property. I assume that they use these old cars and trucks because of the lack of computers that could cause interference, although the tour guide did say that they had a newer fleet as well.
This was our tour bus, an old 1984 MCI tour bus. It was a little worse for wear on the inside, and they made no attempt to identify it as a vehicle of the Observatory. Still wore the yellow stripes and orange seats of its former life. Simple and did it's job.
Our friends who were with us had been here 11 years ago. They didn't have a bus then (and the GBT was under construction), so the tour was conducted in these late 60's diesel Chevy Suburbans and here are these nearly 40 year old trucks still in service. If you look to the left, half out of the frame, you'll see a mid 80's diesel VW pickup. I saw two diesel Rabbits there of the same vintage too.
At first I thought these were more Suburbans, just darker blue this time. But look closely, they are International Travelalls. The Suburbans were three doors (no rear door on the driver's side), these have four. And that's an International Scout pickup hiding behind those two.
The piece de resistance - a diesel Checker Marathon wagon. I gotta believe that not too many Checker wagons have survived, I wonder how many have diesels? If you can look past my grainy picture taken from a moving bus, it looks pretty darn solid, too.
There may have been other diesels, but I didn't catch them.
Because diesel engines have no spark plugs to put extra pings in the listening patterns, maybe ...?
Absolutely. They showed us a demo of what even a digital camera will do to their reception. Gas engines' spark plugs make a mess of things, as would, I assume, computers on newer diesels.
Lots of stuff creates interference. We had to turn off our cell phones to go inside. Check out the link in the story about the radio quiet zone. Cell phone companies have to jump through extra hoops to put up towers there. As a result, we had absolutely no coverage for most of our trip, which was mostly fine with us.
I wanna go back! Nice pics and explanation. I wish I would have seen the IH. I want one of those some day.
I didn't realize the Travelalls were Travelalls until I got home and wrote this up. In fact, I had it written up that they were more Suburbans at first. It was the extra door that gave it away.
So, 11 years ago, did you ride in the Suburbans or the Travelalls?
I pretty sure they were suburbans.