I did actually qualify as a pilot, back in about 1954. The government of the day's financial cutbacks, which the public wasn't told about, determined my remustering in a ground trade, and I became a "Radar Mechanic", speciallising in repair and testing of airborne radar equipment, mostly associated with bomber aircraft.
Much equipment in service was either late WWII or just post WWII; I worked in a Maintenance Unit working shifts round the clock helping Bomber Command keep its stock of spares of Rebecca Mk IV and IFF 3 GR ready for installation out in the squadrons.
That classification would these days be called a"technician" in modern politically correct-speak.
The photo was taken in 1978, when I had been living in Australia for 13 years, and I seem to be a "dashing young man" of 43 enjoying a six hour train journey on board the "Indian Pacific" express, travelling southwards from the outback town of Woomera in the far north of South Australia, to its capital city of Adelaide.
Much of my life has been spent in electronics in one way or another, although I started off seeking a military career first as a deck officer in the British (Royal) Navy, then as an aspiring jet aircraft pilot in their Air Force.
This much more recent photograph is how I look now, and was taken in 1997 at a quite formal occasion, shortly after my retirement from the full-time work-force.
While we humans don't always feel any older as we age, we certainly tend to look it, more's the pity!
I left the Royal Air Force and went into industry in a northern London suburb as a lab technician with a company developing - would you believe it, airborne radar! The project was a follow-on from the miniaturised Rebecca Mk VII fitted to smaller and faster aircraft, known later as Rebecca Mk VIII. This was also sold commercially as the second mark of Distance Measuring Equipment - or DME.
From there I moved to a seaside location and worked in commercial repair work on radios and televisions, and in 1959 moved back to northern London obtaining a position as a shop-floor inspector in an electronic assembly workshop of a company manufacturing a prototype ground-to-air guided weapon.
A promotion took me to Wales as part of a flight trials unit, and a transfer later to the range itself saw me as an operations supervisor in one of the firing instrumentation sections, and then in another, before my departure for Australia in January 1965.
I worked in the broadcasting industry in both "steam radio" and television in a technical and production capacity after arriving in Australia in 1965. While in Perth (Western Australia) in 1969, I left broadcasting to obtain consulting technical work in control systems and building services.
Much of the time was spent on the drawing board. Some of this work was was associated with the last bits of the Western Australian Government Railways' Standard Gauge project, which was a monumental task covering many years in planning, construction and commissioning. In February 1970 I was fortunate to obtain permission to photograph trackside at the almost brand new Perth Terminal the arrival of the inaugural "Indian Pacific" express from Sydney on the Pacific Ocean, to Perth on the Indian Ocean. These dozen or more photographs have never before been published, and here is another worth checking out.
From there, I moved later in 1970 to Whyalla in South Australia, working briefly in the Shipyard Electrical Drawing Office under the direction of Bob McCance, the inevitable Scotsman! Some of the work I did was on Ship 51 - the "Amanda Miller" - which caught fire on the slipway late one summer evening, and burnt down to the keel.
After the fire, I was moved across to the shipyard's parent company - The Broken Hill Proprietary Company - and worked on control systems in the Steelworks Finishing End, then a design study for a proposed transport services telecommunications switching centre, and finally a completely new 11KV/415V reticulation system for the township of Iron Baron in the Middleback Ranges, including the contruction of a petrol service station there.
At that time, Whyalla had just ceased being a "company town", but Iron Baron was still one.
An employment offer at an Adelaide commercial television station moved me back to the "big smoke" and following that a period of consulting again involving theatrical equipment, and after that extensive printed circuit board design on a weapons contract - those were the days of PCB design using an illuminated box with an acetate master sheet laid over the construction grid. Opaque black, and translucent red and blue varying width adhesive tapes and donuts and other pads were then laid on top to produce a twice full size image that could be photographed and then transferred to the actual circuit board again by a photographic process...
In 1977 during a downtime in employment, I obtained shift-work round the clock over a twenty-day rotating cycle with the United States Air Force in the South Australian outback town of Woomera. This lasted just under three years, and each of us was involved in all operations and repairs needed to keep a sixty-foot steerable antenna and the rest of the stuff on-line - the work included hydraulics, pneumatics, cryogenics, heat exchangers... as well as electronics. Interestingly our unit had the highest "up-time" record of all units of the whole of the United States Air Force, 99.8% uptime. That is to say 0.02% emergency downtime - or 5-1/4 hours unscheduled downtime over those 3 years!! And we were foreign civilians!
A digital communications course was also thrown in at a time when personal computers were few and far between, and had a huge 64Kb of memory!
Mid-1980 saw me back in Adelaide and back in the design field, and this led on to my becoming qualified in the used of the AutoCAD PC-based computer aided design software in about 1987, and being involved in a range of industrial control system design projects ranging from fertiliser factory to confectionery factory production lines to extremely large shopping mall complexes' communications and security systems. 1990 saw me working in Europe for six months on a maritime contract, using the CIS Medusa CAD software.
Being "in the right place at the right time" I was invited to write for Australia's best Computer Aided Design - CAD - monthly journal - MultiCAD Magazine - from its inception, and I had a regular shareware column in it for the first couple of years as well as regularly evaluating applications and platform upgrades for many different types of CAD.
Shortly before retiring, I was invited to assist in the instruction of engineers from overseas wishing to take up a new life in Australia, in a series of schemes run by the Department of Education, Employment and Training in association with the Institution of Engineers. Over a three year period, the number of such courses reduced, as did their duration, due to tightening of available funds.
This project is as much as anything to keep my mind active on technical things. A technical interest in railways and in the KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid - concept of control system design encouraged me to look into the feasibility of designing a simple control stand that would interface with ANY keyboard controller for ANY computer application, and having proved it is practical, all there remains to work out is the way to produce these things economically.
HTML and Websites is another area in which I am involved, with about a dozen on various subjects and for several individuals and organisations and groups being regularly maintained. I also sing with a vocal trio who plays to audiences in homes for the aged.
Created 10th January 2001 using the Australian html editor "Flexed" by Infoflex