Cooby Creek Tracking Station in the late 1960s.
Cooby Creek Tracking Station was located 22.5 km north of Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia.
This station was built in 1966 to support NASA's Application Technology Satellite Program, and was a part of the Spacecraft Tracking and Data Acquisition Network. It was designed to be portable and the equipment was housed in trailers that were shipped out to Australia in the mid sixties.
A 12-metre parabolic antenna was used to receive and transmit information to geostationary satellites, which served as the forerunners to modern telecommunication satellites. The steerable crossed yagi antenna was used to transmit and receive telemetry from various spacecraft of that era. The transmitters used Klystron power amplifiers and the receivers were cryogenically cooled maser devices.
On 6 June 1967 the station received the first television program from outside Australia (from expo67) to be received on the Australian East Coast (the first program to Australia, "Down Under comes up Live", was received at Carnarvon on 25 November 1966) and on 25 June 1967 participated in the Our World program linking 24 countries around the world to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
The station closed in 1970.
Cooby Creek tracking station - trailers and satellite antenna
Cooby Creek tracking station phased yagi array with satellite dish in the background
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