Biography

Wintered at Halley 5 station in 1997 and 1998 as an electronics engineer looking after upper atmospheric science experiments including Very Low Frequency radio and optical instruments.

I have many years’ experience designing and deploying systems on polar stations Including Arctic and foreign stations as well as BAS stations and remote field sites. I have worked on a variety of projects since re-joining BAS as a Research Engineer in 2001 including remote environmental power systems, autonomous data logging systems, LIDAR, GPS and Microwave Radiometers.

Currently I look after the engineering aspects of the following science projects:-

Halley: Microwave Radiometer, Airglow Spectrometer, Infrared all sky camera, Black & White and colour visible light spectrum all sky cameras, Fluxgate magnetometer, search coil magnetometer, riometer and a wind / solar experimental power system.

Rothera: Airglow Spectrometer, Airglow imager with multiple wavelength filters, Black & White visible light spectrum all sky camera and a search coil magnetometer.

Field sites: wind / solar experimental power system at Eagle (80S, 22W), Six remote isostatic GPS systems located in the Southern part of the Antarctic peninsula, ten power systems for remote shelf ice movement tracking systems on the Brunt Ice shelf close to Halley. I also look after the electronics aspects including firmware for the ADIOS (Air Deployable Ice Observation System) project.

I am also tasking with ensuring that the Antarctic and Marine Engineering (AME) group have enough resources to support any BAS field project that will use AME services.

Before joining BAS I worked in industry for 8 years as a test engineer, quality manager and test department manager. We designed, manufactured and distributed industrial electrical / electronic products including VME and G64 microprocessor and associated interface cards, network and input/output control products, single board computer systems and fan controllers. Our products were used in sectors as diverse as car factory production line, oil refinery fire control, SCADA plant control, particle accelerator labs, huge cardboard cutting and folding machines and leather skin area/thickness measurement scanners.

My particular electronics interests are microcontrollers, networking systems like CAN bus and Iridium, remote autonomous logging and data collection systems and environmental wind / solar power systems. My chosen programming language is ‘C’ but I’m also getting more into Python.

Research interests

Collaborations