Zac Freeman to begin his toolmaking apprenticeship

Thomas Keating welcomes Zac Freeman to begin his toolmaking apprenticeship. First year training will cover the manufacture of personal equipment using traditional skills to our proven designs dating back to the early 1940's.     Setting a CNC milling machine       Working on a manual lathe

New Commercial Manager

With the retirement of Maxine Gregory, we welcome to TK and QMC Instruments our new Commercial Manager David Roberts - Commercial Manager With previous experience working within the Rail / Highways and Construction Industries, David has also spent much of his life in Southern Africa.  His interests include gardening, DIY, reading fishing. music, Cricket and Rugby. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

MM/THz Scatterometer installed at ESTEC

Working for Elena Saenz of ESA's technical staff, Roger Appleby and Richard Wylde have installed a mm-wave Scatterometer in clean-room facilities in ESTEC in Holland. Designed to measure scattering from both metalic and dielectric materials down to very low levels, the instrument will cover frequencies from W-band to 750 GHz.   An Agilent VNA and VDI heads are used to measuring scattered power, with both the incidence and reflected angles determed by precision optics driven by stepping motors.  The suble nature of the 125mm split-cube optics was enhanced by calculations performed by Cecilia Cappellin of TICRA, and the software control sysyem developed by Phil Atkin of Pixel An...

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MetOP-SG Microwave Sounder - QON testing to start

The TK designed and built EUMETSAT / ESA / AIRBUS MetOP-SG MWS Quasi-Optics Network  Engineering Qualification Model has been completed and will shortly start its electromagnetic testing in specially built facilities in the Physics Department of Cardiff University:     The red parts are supporting components... and (when use in a flight model) not destined for Space.... you have to remember toremove them.  

TK powers Chinese 425 GHz radiometer in geostationary orbit

TK is proud to have supplied a polarizing grid and an ultragaussian corrugated feed horn for an experimental 425 GHz radiometer now operating in geostationary orbit some 35,786 Km above Indonesia. The radiometer was designed and built by the Shanghai Spaceflight Institute of TT&C and Telecommunication in Shanghai and launched in December 2016 as part of FY4A, a Chinese optical metrological satellite The advanced ultragaussian horn provided very low sidelobe feed to the scanning optics: The designed antenna pattern can be seen below  Snippets of the mechanical designs can be seen below    

VDI & TK...Near the Canadian Border

The combined VDI/TK team.... Tom Crowe, Jeffrey Hesler and his sister Tracy Lind plus the TK contingent of Lucy and Richard Wylde, and Lucy's brother William Wilcock travelled up to the Washington State's northern Cascades to climb, Mt. Baker, a still active stratovolcano that lies close to the Canadian border. There's a British connection here as Mt. Baker is named after third lieutenant Joseph Baker of the Royal Navy's 1791-1795 Vancouver expedition, which explored the American North West. After collecting our excellent guides Kevin and Karl from the American Alpine Institute in Bellingham we ventured inland to the trailhead at 3700 ft (1100 M). The trek in along the Heliotrope Ridge invol...

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