During my appenticeship with BT Labs, I was assigned to the Satellite Communications team.
Their work was especially practical, which led to many trips to work directly hands-on at Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall and Madley Communications Centre.
Satellite Carrier Monitoring Project
The biggest project I worked on during my time with BT Labs was the creation of a device that could remotely monitor and report on the quality of a satellite connection. The modems in use at the time offered little in the way of onboard remote monitoring and so the team decided to build a solution themselves! Perfect, these were my type of people 😁
A CAD file was created by one of the hardware specialists, but that document was then handed over to me to source and build using the wonderfully inspiring RS catalogues. I remember when you opened those pages, it felt like anything was possible! Of course, when it came to actually ordering anything at BT Labs it was a different story. Their sourcing process was dragged from the dark ages and really put a (temporary) dampner on any excitement. Just getting hold of a specific resistor, if it wasn’t available in the lab already, was a story of torture.
RF Testing
With the parts sources and the soldering complete it was time to power it up and put it through the required testing. Because the plan was to deploy these units inside of an operational Eath station we had to ensure that it wasn’t about to disrupt the broadcast of Sky News to the nation by spilling out rogue RF signals when it was turned on. To do that, it was put through multiple days of RF testing inside of BT’s RF test facility - basically a huge tent in the middle of a field beside the Labs. The monitoring device we had built was placed on a plastic table at the center of the tent and we all retreated to a subterranean room to watch an explosion of RF across the spectrum and physically all around the device…🤦, back to the literal drawing board!
A few design tweaks and some shorter runs of internal wiring (I think that someone described my first wiring attempts as ‘a Christmas tree’) and we went back to the testing center for a much improved bill of good health.