My Favourite Dishes

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 2nd July 2020 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Virtual Meeting

“My Favourite Dishes” tells two stories and how they came together in my life in an unexpected way.  Firstly there’s radio astronomy so I explain the background science and the way technology has changed from basic observations to the latest interferometry techniques.  Then I recount the parallel story of satellite telecommunications and my involvement in the very early days as an installation engineer working on big dishes.  Finally I bring these two strands together with my involvement at Leeds University to convert some of the redundant earth stations into radio telescopes, with particular reference to the DARA project.

Speaker: Rod Hine

About Rod Hine.

Born just after the war, I was about ten when my Aunt Florrie gave me a book for Christmas. It was “The Boys Book of Space” by Patrick Moore. I was already interested in anything to do with science and engineering and I devoured the book from cover to cover. Shortly afterwards, Sputnik I was launched and seeing it pass over London clinched my interest in physics and space travel. Pretty soon I was deeply involved in electronics and amateur radio. I passed the RAE in 1962 and later took the call-sign G8AQH.

I took physics, chemistry and maths at A-level and in 1964 went up to Churchill College, Cambridge to study Natural Sciences. I later switched to Electrical Sciences and after graduating I joined Marconi at Chelmsford working for several years on satellite communications. That job eventually took me to Nairobi, Kenya after which I worked there in Meteorological communications and later switched to teaching at the Kenya Polytechnic. In 1972 I married a Yorkshire lass I had met in Nairobi and we finally moved back to UK in 1976.

Since then I have had a variety of jobs in electronics and industrial controls. I was a co-founder of Bradford Instruments Limited which designed and supplied industrial control systems from 1982 and only finished trading in 2012. From about 2000 I have been lecturing part-time at University of Bradford although I now seem to have been retired as the Electrical Engineering Department has been wound right down. I got back into astronomy around 1992 when Josie bought me an astronomy book and I joined Bradford Astronomical Society. I’m currently Chairman of BAS, mostly because no-one else is prepared to do the job!

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