With everything ready, on Friday September 8 of 1944 at 10:00 (local), the launching of the first radiosonde was made from the perimeter of the National Observatory (Millás, 1945). Cuba had become the second Latin American country, after Mexico, where this novel investigation technique was used regularly.

A numerous group of officials attended the official act, among these the then Minister of Agriculture, Carlos F. Armenteros, and the already mentioned commodore Aguila Ruíz, Chief of the Cuban Navy. For the American part, among others, the First Secretary of the Embassy, Mr. Gerald Ackerson, and the Naval Attaché of the Mission, Major McClelland (Diario de la Marina, 1944). As it was pointed out before, meteorologist Ralph Higgs acted as representative of the Chief of the USWB.

With the objective of readying the technical means involved in the operation, specialist James Harvey Chaffin Jr., who was at the time Chief of the Service of Radiosondes of the USWB and one of its experts in scientific instruments (Millás, 1945) traveled previously to Havana. Chaffin remained working for several days at Casablanca, immerse in the preparation of the globes and devices together with Luis Larragoiti.

For the launching, the same plazoleta was used that for the preparation and follow up of the pilot globes located next to the oldest building in the meteorological center and to the so called “Sala Meridiana”.

The monitoring and reception equipment on earth consisted on a triad formed by a radioreceiver, a frecuencimeter that “translated” the radio signals to the graph, and the terminal with the plumilla or “inscriptor” that made the printing on the squared paper. Those graphics were known in the language of the English-speaking meteorologists as “raobs.”

Once concluded the radioemision process and reception of data, it was necessary to interpret the graph obtained using the calibration charts given ad hoc by the engineers of Friez / Bendix.

With those data it was possible to proceed to the elaboration of the pseudo-adiabatic charts and to apply the then novel method of isentropic analysis, fruit of the work developed at the end of the thirties by C. G. Rosby and other colleagues from MIT. These analyses were important elements for the prediction area.

It is indispensable to point out that later on devices were incorporated to the radiosondes for radar tracking (well-known as “rawin”) that allowed to determine the direction and speed of the wind in the upper levels without the need of nefoscopic observations or pilot globes that became unusable when cloudiness overcame certain limits.

Furthermore, the teletypewriter connection was extended to the meteorological station of Camagüey -today a Provincial Center of great importance for the National Meteorological Service of Cuba-, where a radiosonde station was also installed later.