Editing MISTRAM (section)

==Key personnel==
Dr. Lewis J. Neelands has been called an engineers' engineer by the people who worked with him when he was with the General Electric Corporation Electronics Laboratory and Heavy Military Electronics Department (HMED) in the 1950s and early 60's. His contributions to missile guidance and telemetry made him a key figure in the Altas Guidance and MISTRAM programs, two of HMED's most challenging and successful efforts.<ref name="neelands">{{cite web|author=Kevin Neelands|title=Dr. Lewis J. Neelands biography on 100th anniversary of General Electric Co|url=http://user.gru.net/nemesis/dadbio.htm}}</ref>

In retrospect, Neelands said he did not get his greatest satisfaction from his work on the Atlas guidance (about which he said,"it was successful because of a bunch of other people who put it together and made it work"). It is MISTRAM, missile tracking and measuring system, that he remembers with greater pride. "Nothing could match it at the time for the complexity and precision it required," he recalls of the real-time measuring system for precisely tracking a missile's flight. One of his colleagues remembers, "In 1960 he solved the elusive problem of trajectory measurement -- of bringing together at one place for processing, the signals received from widely spaced receiving stations while overcoming inaccuracies due to the propagation anomalies in the medium connecting the stations. A related problem that Lew solved was how to do this using frequencies sufficiently high to develop the required angular measurement accuracy without measurement ambiguities and without requiring a large number of receiving stations to resolve these ambiguities." He conceived a system of unprecedented accuracy.<ref name="technometrics"/> The technical work on the Hermes A-3 rocket guidance was headed by Dr. Lewis J. Neelands and resulted in a successful system with the know-how later transferred to another ICBM guidance system known as the 8014 project and also to the highly accurate Mistram instrumentation equipment, all were based on use of a microwave interferometer.<ref name="neelands"/>  Dr. Neelands died at his home in Gainesville Florida on July 17, 2007, at the age of 91.