Ian Kimber Scientific and Technical Consultant
Abstract
Ian Kimber is a retired independent scientific and technical consultant with a long record of innovation into both the commercial and defence research and development areas. In spite of his mature years he is still active in the area of innovation with several useful patents in the last few years.
Most of his working life Ian was employed full time in CRL Ltd (formally EMI and then THORN EMI Central Research Laboratories) and still has contacts with them. However he is able to offer consulting effort as a free agent and be bound by strict commercial confidentiality to any company he works with. He is also quite happy to assign any patents that come as a result of paid consultancy work to the company that is employing him for this task for use in the area within which they operate.
He has a very broad base of experience in the area of the Physical Sciences, Electronics and Signal processing and has a good track record of teaching innovative skills to others and re-motivating engineers and project teams.
He is also familiar with contract bidding procedures and has writing skills that enable the creation of successful competitive bids by the development of Unique Selling Points (USPs) and the "beefing up" of the project team's track record during the bidding process and the initial stages of design.
Areas where his skills may be particularly well applied are listed below. These originate from his lifetime's experience of working as a scientific expert in support of innovation within a large manufacturing conglomerate company and the selling of innovative problem solving to company directors, and R&D agencies.
A more detailed description of his experience with project examples is given in the main part of the CV.
Ian Kimber is not available for full time employment but is able to enter into long-term part time support arrangements to ensure that initial ideas are seen through to successful completion.
Ian can arrange to be in daily commuting distance of a large area of the south east or south west of England. Other areas of operation will incur accommodation or transport costs.
Contact, personal and educational information
Ian Kimber offers his scientific and technical consultancy services through Camfield Consultants Ltd. This is a husband and wife team of technical and commercial consultancy with a rare spread of skills. Jose Kimber is a commercial and risk management consultant working on bid negotiation contract procedures and long-term risk management.
Main Address
5 Cudmore Park
Tiverton
Devon
EX16 4QJ
Phone 01884 252460 Mobile 07966 159 240
DATE OF BIRTH :- 4th June 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH :- Thurmaston, Leicestershire
NATIONALITY :- British NATIONALITY OF PARENTS British
Educational and Professional Qualifications
BOLTON COUNTY GRAMMAR SCHOOL
1959 GCE "O" Level:
English Language, French, History, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Woodwork.
1961 GCE "O" Level:
General Paper
1961 GCE "A" Level:
Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Physics(Distinction),Chemistry.
1962 GCE "A" Level:
Mathematics, Further Maths, Physics "S" Level, Chemistry "S" Level (Distinction)
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
1965 Degree BSc (Special) Physics Upper Second Class Honours
MEMBERSHIP OF PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS
Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
Member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers
Associate Member of the Institute of Physics
Licentiate of the Royal Photographic Society
A member of the "Association of Old Crows"
MOD Security Clearance held by CRL Ltd, details available if needed.
Basic terms
Normal daily rate ?400 per day +expenses for odd days of consultancy. This is negotiable for longer term relationships and call off consultancy.
The daily rate includes up to about 20 miles of driving to a customer's location from one of the company's locations. Longer distances will incur transport surcharges at Inland revenue approved mileage rates.
TECHNICAL EXPERIENCE
1965-67 Plessey Telecommunications Liverpool
Design of circuits for a magnetic film store. Evaluation of the first monolithic integrated circuits (RTL, DTL & TTL) and their associated equipment practice for large system use.
1967-1999 EMI then THORN EMI Central Research Laboratories then CRL Ltd
1967-68 Research Engineer
Magnetic film store electronics design. Very wide band (DC-1GHz) amplifier
design.
1968-69 Research Engineer (Microwave Dept.)
Designing a varactor diode parametric amplifier at 10GHz. Extreme speed digital circuits
for counters (DC-1GHz).
1970-74 Senior Research Engineer
Research on a radar design problem led to the design of fast-switched microwave local oscillators for a maritime search radar system that went into production and is still in use. Investigation of high-speed digital circuits for CAT scanner. Team leader of up to 6 engineers.
1974-84 Principal Research Engineer
Leading several teams with a total of about 15-20 engineers.
Research into Electronic Warfare. Team leader for the signal processing and local oscillators of a major EW System. Lead the CRL end of the project from writing the feasibility study proposal to the Pre production model delivery during this period.
Other projects during this period
1985-86 Staff scientist
Expanding the DRFM research to cover the whole area of fully digital radar EW and communications systems. Work included the whole range of RF and control hardware, algorithms and system from ASIC to MMI. This work was the precursor to today's software implemented radio systems.
1986-1999 Senior Staff Scientist
Continuing and developing the programme above. With the accent gradually turning towards DSP based solutions Selling the work to a wide range of potential users. Consultation and idea generation throughout the laboratory.
Major activities
Research for generic DSP systems for radar and EW systems. Led a team developing design and software tools for internal company use.
Bid for and won a project to design a software-implemented modem for European Space Agency This modem had to perform all tasks from broad band Spread spectrum to extreme narrow band ranging
The originator of several significant DERA Pathfinder projects in the area of flexible signal processing systems design and the algorithms that they would use. Led the teams that developed the deliverable hardware and software. The final project completed in 2001 resulted in the design of commercial off the shelf digitiser processor modules.
Other activities during this period include a study into the performance of leak noise correlators for Thames water. This resulted in a successfully completed project on an advanced leak correlator built as a software virtual instrument and running on a standard laptop PC. This involved several patented processing ideas that increased the efficiency of the processing and enabled the automatic filtering of the signal to optimise the accuracy of the result. This work was later published in the journal of the IEE. Work on locator and detector systems for use in extremely difficult environments.
1999-2002 Consultant
In 1999 Ian took early retirement so he could spend more time on his own personal research and web page developments. These are available via http://i.am/ian.kimber. He still contracted back to CRL two or three days a week and during this period supported several bids and created further innovations these involved the following broad topics.
At the end of March 2002 it CRL decided that as part of a reorganisation it would change its relationship with innovative consultants. Rather than support them directly it would allow them to sell their services independently but offer them special terms if they brought R&D projects into CRL. This enables the consultants to offer more economic rates stripped of the CRL overhead but means that they have to do most of the marketing themselves! (2007 added note) Some time after this CRL ceased trading and Ian kimber is not actively seeking any new contracts but might be persuaded to help if any interesting propsals come his way.
PUBLICATIONS RECORD
PATENTS
Named as inventor on the following British Patents
Not Known Magnetic store Sense Amplifiers (with Plessey)
BP1271517 Differential amplifiers
BP1518103 Signal receiving and transmitting systems
BP1523196 Oscillator circuits
BP1532777 Apparatus for providing a succession of output signals from a single input signal
BP1571828 Surface wave oscillator arrangements
BP1602193 Frequency Modulated pulse generation
BP2009547 Oscillator circuits
83300988.9 Communications systems for a high noise environment
8824968.5 Radio frequency transmission and reception system
This list is not complete. More recent patents and applications in the pipeline have not been included.
PAPERS
Presented paper on High performance microwave local oscillator measurements at
RSRE radar symposium 1970 (Classified Secret)
Measurement of frequency stability of agile frequency sources.
IEE Colloquium paper 1981
Design and trials of a noise resistant technique for Mainsborne signalling
IEE MATES conference paper 1982
Generic techniques for the identification of wanted and unwanted modulations on pulses
IEE Colloquium paper 1994
"Breaking the mould" Open systems for military signal processing at the joint EWRCC and RRCC conference The interplay between modern radar systems and modern EW systems. May 2001
The Thames Water software correlator paper was published in IEE review September 1999