www.timstinchcombe.co.uk

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What I do for a living

I currently work for Heber Ltd., a small company based just outside Stroud, whose mainstay is making PCBs for the gaming industry (i.e. for one-armed bandits and video games). I have to employ both my hardware and software engineering skills to the task of keeping our large Agilent 3070 'bed-of-nails' in-circuit PCB testing machines running optimally. It is challenging, fairly dynamic, and very rewarding (from the job satisfaction point of view).

My background

I was born in 1957 in Devizes (southern England), but my family moved around to various places until we ended up in Abergavenny, South Wales, when I was about 9, and I lived there until 1981. In 1976 I started studies at the University College of North Wales, Bangor (University of Wales, Bangor, as it is now), graduating with a maths degree three years later. I then did several years writing test-system software, before moving to Cheltenham (south central England, and where I still am) to work at Smiths Industries (now part of GE Aviation), who are a large aerospace contractor, and with whom I worked on three large avionics programmes (two civil, one defence).

In 1995, becoming increasingly uneasy about what the future held for me at Smiths, I left and became a full-time student again, only this time it was at Royal Holloway College, University of London: from there I gained an MSc in 1996, and a PhD in 2000 (both mathematics again). There then followed a short spell at QinetiQ in Malvern, doing radio communications research, during which time I re-discovered my lost childhood-interest in electronics (a more in-depth relation of how this came about is here). In about 2002 I thus resolved to change career direction yet again, to move into something more hardware or electronics orientated. To that end I signed up to do an HNC correspondence course, in electronics, through COLU (the 'Cleveland Open Learning Unit', part of the University of Teesside: highly recommended - the course was very enjoyable, I learned a lot, the tutors are very friendly, and I now have a qualification that says I know something about electronics!). I completed the HNC late in 2005, by which time I had already achieved my aim through the job at Heber!

[And in case anyone reading this is into Golay sequences, or is curious to know what a maths PhD thesis might look like, the title of my thesis is "Aperiodic Correlations of Length 2m Sequences, Complementarity, and Power Control for OFDM" (click for the file, 1.4MB: the abstract is just a single sheet though.)]

[Page last updated: 12 Nov 2008]