Hugh Chivers graduated in Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester, UK, in 1959. He moved to the USA and led a group studying the conjugate relationships of high latitude ionospheric absorption using the Riometer technique. In 1964 he set up the Space Disturbance Monitoring Station for ESSA (later NOAA) in Alaska by incorporating a variety of ground based sensors. In 1968 he joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, where he led a project studying the solar wind using observations of interstellar scintillations. After the deployment of the first automatic geophysical observatory in Antarctica (UGO), he formed a group to develop the fast

response low power Riometer now manufactured by La Jolla Sciences since 1973. He especially values the contributions of Stefan Maagoe, Ian Bird, Bob Barker and John Hargreaves in this project. Later developments led to pioneering work on the narrow beam steerable antennas for IRIS imaging systems, a portable wide-beam antenna system for synoptic Riometer observations, a precision reference RF noise source and a portable RF noise source adapted for field use with Riometers.