Dr Ramachandra Rao has built up a flourishing school of research in ionosphere and radio physics. He has studied diffraction of light up to 400 Mc/sec, and verified the theoretical expectations. He has developed new and simple methods for measuring some of the physical parameters of diffusion and drift transistors, as also for studying ultrasonic velocity, absorption and their temperature variation in liquids and solids. He has studied exhaustively the characteristics of horizontal ionospheric winds over a sunspot cycle and obtained several new results.