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55batch was issued to cover the developing situation further south, we soondeveloped quite a legal turn of mind to make sure we were following theCommander%u2019s intentions. One lesson that came out loud and clear wasthat ROEs needed to be exercised down to station, squadron and crewlevel in future exercises. We had an ever-present Soviet AGI off the island, a Primorye I think,with a large white superstructure housing all its aerials. We had onerobust antipodean Chinook pilot who used to visit us regularly in NimrodOps and he offered to fly out in his helicopter to donate a bottle of maltto the Russian captain and then perhaps inadvertently %u2018blast thesuperstructure and aerial to blazes%u2019 with his downwash.But let me tell you a little about some of the Nimrod sensors. TheMark 1 eyeball was as important as ever, just as it had been in WW II.Crews immediately had reservations about the performance of thestandard trusted binoculars of the previous twenty years when there wasa risk of getting too close to a vessel for the first stab at visualidentification. In early April, we made a local purchase of the six bestbinoculars we could find between Elgin and Inverness and they weresoon performing well out of Ascension. However, this improvedperformance brought its own problems with aircraft vibration interferingwith the enhanced image. Help was at hand with the arrival of %u2018the egg%u2019,courtesy of the US Navy. %u2018The egg%u2019 was a small gyro unit which couldbe clamped to the binoculars to damp out the aircraft vibration. Thestabilised vision brought an immediate improvement in performance.There was a small residual problem however, particularly in the cockpit,as too rapid scanning across the horizon brought a counteraction fromthe gyro and the pilot%u2019s head had a tendency to precess anti-clockwise,and, of course, clockwise when south of the equator.A Nimrod sighting of an Argentinean Boeing 707 searching theSLOCS for our Task Force provided the impetus for fitting Sidewinders.One of the spin-offs was a cartoon of a very happy looking Nimrod withtwo clockwork keys fitted either side of the fuselage (Side-winder%u2026?).There was also the mischievous thought that a Nimrod attacking aBoeing 707 could have been de Havilland%u2019s ultimate revenge held overfrom the Comet%u2019s fatigue problems in the 1950s.The Searchwater worked well, even though it was a new sensor to theradar operators. It gave consistent security of search out to 150 nmseither side of track , something the old 1960s ASV-21 radar of Nimrod