94GHz Cloud Radar integration into EarthCARE underway...

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    

Nothing new under the sun

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.

Student Outreach 2014

In 2013 Thomas Keating stepped up its efforts to provide students who have Physics and Engineering in their sights  - both at school and at university -  with an experience of industrial life.  We have continued this into 2014. Vicky Whiting is an Engineering undergraduate at the University of Bath and joined TK for a month in summer 2014.  She worked on a range of projects, including: a study of the uses of a new 3D printer at TKdesigning a new support for the electronics boards used in the Support Units in the Pro/Engineer CAD package and printed themprinting a model of an upgrade to a quasi-optical in-vessel plasma diagnostics for the Joint European Taurus (JET)designi...

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High Frequency Circuit Simulator at TK

Through the good offices of Dr. Pat Foster, we have obtained a licence for v14 of HFSS, and have purchased aDell R5500 Rackmounted workstation and added 48 GB of RAM. We have started looking at the operation of a waveguide 240 GHz Single Sideband diplexer. It's operation can be seen in this video.