SNOTEL stands for Snow Telemetry. It is a U.S. Department of Agriculture long-term system of 700 remote sensing stations on mountain tops throughout the west. These transmit daily reports to two master receiving stations in Idaho and Utah. An unusual transmission method is employed, high-frequency radio reflection from sporadic meteor trails. The main objective is to measure winter snowfall. Analysis at the U.S.D.A offices in Portland, Oregon by non-stop computers and hydrology experts provides early prediction of water supplies during the next year, and temperature readings predict snowmelt for dam control and prevention of flooding. By the early 90s the hardware in the remote stations was fifteen years old and getting difficult to maintain, especially considering the difficulty of access. SEMCOR got a contract to provide specifications for the purchase of new transceivers for the remote stations because of my HF radio expertise from RCA and ham radio. I did this, and the contract was awarded to Meteor Communications, the only U.S. company in that specialty business. The original contractor, Western Electric, was no more, a victim of the breakup of the Bell System.

The U.S.D.A then wanted to remake the two master stations with an architecture which would make them, the U.S.D.A, as independent as possible from Meteor Communications. They wanted to provide the master stations with PC computers to buffer the data coming in, and to monitor the unattended master stations environment. I provided them with specifications for industrial-strength PCs for this. Each station was to be itself redundant, since SNOTEL is of utmost strategic importance to everyone living in the western U.S. It was to have four receivers, one for each quadrant, with some coverage overlap, two omni-directional high-power transmitters for polling, and two computers. Because of my spacecraft experience I was tapped to work interactively on the overall system architecture with the U.S.D.A program manager in Portland, but they were unable to make a contract with SEMCOR, which gave me permission to moonlight at home for the U.S.D.A.

I continued to do architectural work, and the question of programming the PCs arose. The U.S.D.A. had programmers from a local company under contract to program the big analysis computers, but these had no PC experience and knew only UNIX. I convinced them that the PCs of that era, which were 16 MHz 386s, could not support UNIX, and proposed to program them myself in C++, which was new then. I would use a real-time MS-DOS-compatible operating system from General Software which was cheap and would not tax the computer. I have credits for seven computer-related postgraduate courses at the University of California, including the first ever in C++ there. This proposal was accepted and I did this for about a year. I also needed to devise, and sometime make with my own hands, special combining and distributing electronics to connect the four receivers with the two computers without any possible fault bringing down the whole station. The computers also needed a way to re-boot themselves without human intervention when the program seized up.

After a few months, the local company was fired for incompetence, and Computer Sciences Corporation took over by default, since they had a U.S.D.A.-wide programming contract. Thus I became a CSC contract employee. This was a positive experience; CSC always acted scrupulously professional. They were rather spread out; my contract came from Walnut Creek, California, my administrative boss was in Bremerton, Washington, my technical boss was in Portland, the checks came from Arlington, Virginia, and I had to go to a local CSC office for mandatory training in "Conflict of Interest" and "Sexual Harassment"! They also had a systematic process for software design which I had to at least pretend to comply with, although it was intended for large-scale mainframe programs and has no real-time component. The later months were after SEMCOR had laid me off, and it would be eighteen months before I got another regular job.

I visited the master station sites several times. That was an experience too. The Idaho site was in a state prison farm and the Utah site on a hidden U.S.A.F. facility with roaming armed patrols and windowless buildings, next to a uranium reprocessing facility. The U.S.D.A. definitely didn't want their master stations fooled around with! The last trip was after CSC lost the re-compete of their contract. I got an unsolicited purchase order directly from the Government! The program I wrote still runs, though on twice-upgraded computers.