The National Centre for Atmospheric Science's Atmospheric Measurement Facility (NCAS AMF) operate two radiosonde sounding systems: unit one (this one) is situated at the University of Manchester and unit two at the University of Leeds, both compatible with the Vaisala RS92 sonde family and support the extended sondes recommended by Vaisala. Both systems are 400 MHz variants.

Although now designated as NCAS AMF instruments they have each had previous designations with this unit previously been known as the "Manchester/UFAM: Vaisala Radiosonde" and represented by "man-radiosonde" in filenames.

Vaisala radiosonde systems are used by meteorological organizations all around the world to measure weather in the Earth’s atmosphere, from the boundary layer to the upper atmosphere. The radiosonde is a lightweight, balloon-borne instrument that measures profiles of pressure, temperature and humidity from the ground to approximately 40 km. The radiosonde is equipped with a radio transmitter for sending the measurements securely to the observing station. The user has control over the sounding process by integrating sounding controls, archiving the sounding data and meteorological message creation. For routine soundings the system offers a variety of features and allows the desired balance of manual and automatic control. In addition to the traditional alphanumeric messages, the system software produces the WMO specified BUFR messages. This feature enables users to follow the WMO's recommendation to move from traditional alphanumeric codes to binary BUFR codes.

This record also records the present and previous instrument scientists responsible for the equipment (recorded here as "operators") for historic purposes with the current instrument scientist given last. It is possible that other operators may use the equipment from time to time and these should be recorded as dataset authors for each associated datasets in the archive.