Frost would take the tape home and his wife would plot it, outlining the Doppler curve, the inflection and the time of the pass-over. For almost two years, Frost, Clark and Melvin, with the help of other volunteers, maintained the antenna atop the roof at Kingsbury. Their equipment was in the corner of a top floor teaching lab, locked in a steel cage built by a UNH custodian. Checking the antenna meant climbing up a ladder affixed to the wall, pushing open a trap door, and clambering onto the roof. Our research was pretty thin back in 1956, 1957.
Frost today dismisses the lack of funds or high tech equipment.
We were simply doing this for the love of being involved. We considered ourselves on the frontier of the space age.