Mid-1990s
Enter NEXRAD

In those days, few stations had their own live radar, even fewer had digitized radar, and fewer still were equipped with Doppler capability. Our problem was, FasTrac required a live, digitized radar feed.  In order to expand our market, we learned how to digitize old analog radar, but soon ran out of them as well.

We caught a break, though. NEXRAD was coming up to speed during this time, which allowed us to acquire decommissioned WSR-74C radars from the National Weather Service, retrofit them with Doppler capability, and provide the refurbished systems to the broadcast community. In retrospect, this was the beginning of our eventual radar division. When we ran out of the decommissioned 74-C's in the mid-90's, we finally decided to build our own from the ground up.

Company president Bob Baron, next to an early Baron radar installation.

The WSR-88D systems that replaced the 74Cs provided the benefit of nationwide coverage and NIDS (NEXRAD Information Display System) processing for entire storms, but there were drawbacks, too; namely, a 5+ minute delay between lowest-level scans and relatively low resolution.   We became a NEXRAD NIDS reseller, applied our storm tracking to the NIDS product and integrated NEXRAD with live radar for stations that had both.

A lot could be done with the data, so we repackaged the NIDS attributes and made it available to broadcasters, applying our storm tracking technology and integrating NEXRAD for stations that had live radars. Which leads us to...