Profile

I live in Leicester with my wife and two sons, who are in primary school. We have no pets, but my imaginary cat is called Pickles. I am a school governor, a STEM ambassador, and the regional Schools Liaison Officer for the Institute of Engineering and Technology – so yes,  I’m passionate about education. I also love travel, forests, languages, the sea, music. I’ve been lucky to live and work in several different countries and cultures, so most of my friends are in other countries.

My main project right now is to upgrade a huge (32m diameter) dish for future missions to the moon, Mars, and elsewhere in deep space. This dish is about 40 years old, and used to just sit and support geostationary communications: this year it will become the world’s first privately owned and operated deep space communications facility. I am responsible for making sure that every technical requirement we have for the system will be met by the design, and also that it will be tested, and that the whole series of tests together prove that the facility is ready for operations.

Sometimes this is reading and reviewing work done by other people, and asking ‘what if this doesn’t work?’, ‘how can we break this and still keep going safely?’, or ‘what’s the best way to test this?’ I also write software sometimes, I use tools to analyse space missions and how our ground stations can most effectively form part of those mission systems. Being a systems engineer means being responsible for the overall behaviour of the entire system – I don’t need to know all the details of every block – just what the interfaces are and how they are interdependent.

Most of my work is computer based. There is a lot of formality needed in large projects, and in space projects because of the cost and risks. And requirements verification is always a formal exercise in any kind of engineering. So, I use online management tools, I use spreadsheets, project planning tools, analytical tools, and my own custom software sometimes.

But I am just one person in a team that continues to grow, and everyone needs to understand their role in the team and stay aware of what each other are doing. We have project level meetings, sub-team catch-up and planning meetings, progress reviews, and so on. Normally some of these would be real meetings, just now they are online.

I start around 9am, and check to see if there are any new urgent questions I have to answer or tasks to do. Then I check again the schedule for the day – any meetings, phone calls, or other things with fixed times. I go for a walk or bike ride in the middle of the morning and get a coffee and newspaper. I then work until I collect my children from school. I usually in the evening or night also.

I think I’d put together some kits using software defined radios to make practical workshops for people to learn about signals and communications, in particular demonstating satellite communications.