A consortium led by Thales Defence has been awarded preferred bidder status for the Government’s £800m Watchkeeper programme developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). If the consortium can agree a contract with the MoD, a joint venture company will be formed in Leicester with the promise of new jobs. “It would be around about the 120 mark,” said a spokesman for ...

Aeroplanes have had electronics in them for almost as long as aircraft have had engines. First in radio sets and then in radar and navigation devices. In parallel, as aircraft grew, hydraulic amplification and control supplemented, and then replaced, mechanical linkages between pilots and the various flaps, elevators and rudders used for manoeuvring. Fly-by-wire saw computers finally break all mechanical ...

The booming interest in wireless LANs (WLANs) and 802.11 standard systems in particular, has triggered the introduction of a number of application specific signal analysis and hardware and software systems for speeding time-to-market development of WLAN boards and modules. This is presenting design engineers with a variety of modulation and signal formats, not to mention the different frequency and bandwidth ...

The simplest, probably the cheapest and least obtrusive way of solving the UK's transport problems is through electronics....

As manufacturing continues to move away from the UK to take advantage of the cheap labour which is available abroad, it seems now is the time for us to have a rethink. If cost is the only advantage that manufacturing abroad has, then why is it that Nokia can not only design its mobile phones in Finland, but also manufacture ...

It is a good few years ago since processor board designers in military and aerospace applications started using “commercial” FPGA and PC technologies in the interest of being more cost conscious. The adoption of commercial technology, such as high performance FPGAs and Compact PCI (cPCI) bus architectures, can make system development faster and more cost effective. “FPGA-based processor boards and ...

The first major trials for the Future Integrated Soldier Technology (FIST) programme are due to take place in September this year. The trials are designed to iron out what the prime contractor Thales will focus on developing. “The purpose is to improve the capability of the dismounted soldier,” says Paul Wathen, who is the international collaboration manager for the Thales ...