RADIO RESEARCH STATION

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25995, 24 December 1949, Page 6

RADIO RESEARCH STATION

ESTABLISHMENT IN CHRISTCHURCH

PLAN MENTIONED BY N.Z. SCIENTIST From Our Own Reporter

WELLINGTON, December 23. The establishment of a radio research station at Canterbury University College, the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, was mentioned to-day .by Dr. C. Ellyett, formerly a lecturer in physics at the college, who returned to New Zealand to-day by the Akaroa. Dr. Ellyett, who has specialised in radio research while completing his doctorate in physics at Manchester University, said that arrangement? for the establishment of the station were well under way. Dr. Ellyett went to Britain on a national research scholarship and qualified at Manchester University for a fellowship offered by Imperial Chemical Industries worth £6OO a year, His studies were essentially in radaf, he said, and he had been appointed to the research staff at Jodrell Bank, a field station maintained by the university, where he was one of three New Zealanders on a technical staff of 30. The main concern of the station was the behaviour of meteors, a branch or radio study which began during the war when radar, reaching for the first time into the ionosphere to locate German V2 rockets, found interference from meteors. Research had passed on to the study of meteors themselves ana had so far progressed that at Jodrell Bank there was apparatus whicn could automatically locate, measure, and follow a meteor the size of a pinhead travelling over Switzerland w miles above the earth’s surface « 14,000 miles an flour. There were two reasons for this type of research. One was astronomical or pure research, and the other the mo re practical one of the study of the ionosphere which affected among other things radio reception*. Dr. Ellyett is accompanied by nis wife, formerly Miss Ngaire Warren, or Darfield, and their 14-months-oW daughter, Dianna.