The Radio Sun and Planets

Abstract

On the morning of February 12, 1942, the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau passed undetected through the English Channel on a voyage from Brest in France to Kiel in Germany. The reason they sailed unmolested by British warplanes was that the British radar was being jammed by radio interference. J. S. Hey, a physicist who had learned something about newly invented radar at the outbreak of World War II, was assigned the task of investigating the jamming. The suspicion was that the Germans had come up with a device that could blind the British radar.