We are delighted to have finished making - some two weeks after the steel arrived and now trialed - our first Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) injection mould for new client Air Control Entech to provide the frame of a face visor: Thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of people, especially Simon Duke, our Toolroom Manager... Pictured below is Apprentice Zac Feeman with a trialled part in his hands... as well as one on his head.     and a video of our customer running mould running can be seen here   A snipped of the mould tool design can be seen here     and video of programming the tool paths and our high speed Bostomatic CNC milling machining cutting the form in...

  Thomas Keating continues to work: Staff who can work from home (Physicist, Designers etc) are doingso -  and our IT infrastructure (in particular, VPN's give remote access to our network, including CAD,electromagnetic and thermal analysis software as well as printing) is currently holding up well.  Colleagues who cut metal are practicing social distancing (our machines are well spread out, so 2M distance.... a broomhandle away) is possible and cleaning their hands alot... So Thomas Keating Ltd is operating surprisingly normally   The Physics Department in Cardiff is currently closed, so QMC Instruments is continuing to design, market and support our customer base, but n...

At the end of January, TK shipped two types of loads for mm-wave radiometer calibration:  An internal cone load - derived from the SWI instrument on ESA's Juice mission. In this case TK is a subcontractor to VDI, having alsodesigned and buit the from end optics of the protype CubeSat     .. and two loads derived from the warm pyramidal target on the MetOP-SG Ice Cloud Imager mission:     The latter can be seen in our TVAC chamber where the embeded Platinum Resistance Thermometers (PRTS) are being calibrate against four surounding SPRTs, to a precision at the 10mK level.    

TK has been developing in collaboration with the Institute of Applied Physics in Bern - for a number of years - the calibration target for EUMETSAT's MetOP-SG MWS radiometer. The ProtoFlight Model - (PFM) - the first one due to fly in space - has been undergoing successful final RF testing in Bern. In the pictures you can see the equipment used to make radiometric S11scattering measurements across the microwave sounder's bands - from 23 to 229 GHz. The target - whose temperature can be determined from embedded Platinum Resistance Thermometers to a few milliKelvin- is the black object to the top right. All S11 measurements are with the very tight -45dB monostatic reflectivity requirement - an...

We are delighted that Callum Barrett, our new apprentice has won the Best Apprenticeship 2019 award given by the Rotary Club at a ceremony at Tanbridge House School.       Callum ....second from the left...

With Quasi-Optics from TK and mm-wave sources and detectors from VDI, Petr Neugebauer's multi-frequency High Field ESR spectrometer is undergoing "first-light" (to use an astronomers term) testing.   With the dry magnet from Cryogenic Ltd nicely buried in the floor - and  elegant mounting structure and covering from colleagues in Brno - the Instrument is looking very impressive:     The frequency-independent Quasi-Optical Bridge has an unusual feature of having common path lengths in both the LO chain and source chain to the primary inductive-mode detector and phase reference - to minimisethe effect of source phase noise on the instrument's' sensitivity.    ...