A copy of this manual surfaced recently in the collection of Allan Walker. When the document was shown at an RAC gathering in December 2003, Mike Wood immediately recognised it as a manual he had authored in 1959. As if the discovery of a surviving Adastra manual is not significant enough, Mike also recognised it as the original copy!

Because of the rarity of this document, together with the fact that it describes Adastra's photographic survey operations in detail, it was decided that it should be reproduced on the website in full. Furthermore, it was also decided that it should be a facsimile reproduction. This presented numerous problems. Firstly, the manual was printed on foolscap paper. Secondly, the document was apparently printed on a Gestetner machine and the type is now faded and fuzzy, so presenting the manual as a series of 70 scanned images was not an option. Quite clearly, the document had to be re-typed!

Although we had considered employing a secretarial service to do it, Kevin Pavlich decided to bite the bullet and do it "in house". Actually it was done in several houses, for he enlisted the aid of his daughters Kathy and Leone who have laboriously prepared a stunningly faithful recreation of the manual. Thank you Kathy and Leone for a brilliant effort!

In order to preserve the layout of the manual, it is presented here in Portable Document Format (PDF). To view the manual you will require Adobe Reader to be installed on your computer. If you don't have this program, it can be downloaded free of charge from the Adobe website. Alternatively, many computer magazine cover CDs include the program. There is also provision for downloading the PDF as a compressed (Zip) file.