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...

QMC Instruments Ltd. has offered cryogen-free THz detector systems since the autumn of 2012. This landmark is proving invaluable to those who do not have easy access to liquid cryogens. 24/7 operation is also a boon to many research groups with a heavy workload. In April 2017 our Sales Director Ken Wood was in the US to commission two such systems. Here is Professor Mona Jarrahi at UCLA with her system set up on her optical bench. Just a few days later Ken was further east with another very similar system. Here is Professor Susanna Widicus Weaver and members of her group at Emory University in Atlanta alongside their new detector. Note the size of the compressor (grey object lower left of im...

Our colleague Roland Albers.... currently buried in TK's MetOP-SG and ATMS programmes .... was the well deserved winner with his team members from Cranfield at UKSPACE 2017's Sir Authur C Clarke Centenary Awards in the Student category for winning the Mars society's international group design competition for a manned Mars flyby ..... Lot of details here      Roland in the middle here with Tim Peake and members of his student team (Will Blackler, Tiago Matos and Rob Sandford).   and a better image of Roland with his colleagues is here    

TK designed and build the Quasi-Optical multiplexer and antenna Feed for JAXA's Cloud Pulse Radar.... though AIRIBUS in Germany as Prime ....   and provide for a novel power monitoring scheme to track the power levels transmtted by the EIK 94 GHz microwave tube.       It is nice to see it being integrated into the EarthCARE satellite   The TK designed & manufactured optical compoents - fitted to an AIRBUS CFRP plate  Hardware -  can be see here:     and our Gaussian Beam-mode software    

TK is currently buried in the EUMETSAT programme. We might like to think that it all our Quasi-Optical work is new.... but a trip to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum near Dullas airport  (Time to kill before a flight) .... presented the following Engineering Model of a 1960 Tiros weather satellite. Looks well made, with lightened mirror supports and a pair of corrugated feeds.

Virginia Diodes Inc very kindly hosted Richard Wylde and Jonas Kindervater of Johns Hopkins for initial trials of a novel Electron Spin Resonance Bridge... which will feature VDI high power Sources at 108 and 216 GHz. The Bridge forms part of a complex neutron diffraction experiment devised by Prof Collin Broholm  of JHU which will be run at the NIST Gaitherburg reactor facility to look at novel quantum materials (topological materials, quantum spin fluids ). The bridge routes power from VDI's sources to a long HE11 corrugated probe which drops down inside a magnet to the sample help at sub 1K levels.  A Martin-Pupplet polarizing interferometer allow both linear injection (to give ...