Wild's team now needed a site for a new, better engineered and more powerful radiospectrograph and a large swept-frequency interferometer with which to observe the radio source. In September 1950, he and three colleagues borrowed a decrepit ex-military ambulance and with a spectrum analyser assessed potential sites on the outskirts of Sydney and down the New South Wales south coast that would be least affected by interference from radio transmissions. They chose a grazing property outside Dapto, 15 kilometres south of Wollongong, shielded by a 1500-foot mountain. Here the Radiophysics Solar Group went from strength to strength, to the extent that Wild later said "there was no question that we were the world champions". Professor Marcel Minnaert, the eminent Belgian astronomer, wrote in 1963:The history of solar radio-spectroscopy is mainly the history of Australian work on this subject. ... At each meeting of the International Astronomical Union, highly competent specialists such as Wild [and Smerd and Christianson, headed by Pawsey] … were able to announce spectacular progress.
