Interview with Paul Hopwood

Featured Engineer

Paul Hopwood

Paul Hopwood - Senior Engineer, Capita Secure Information Systems

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

I first started tinkering when I was nine or ten when I was given a Radio Shack 100-in-one as a Christmas present; mainly I think to stop me from taking things apart. From then on all my spare time was spent at the library trying to understand how and why the circuits worked and what else could be done.

The choice of reference books on electronics at the library back then was somewhat limited but I stuck gold when I found an old ARRL handbook and a book for a HNC electronics course.

At the same time I was fortunate that my secondary school had its own UV light box & bubble etch system and were relaxed enough to allow me to use the facilities outside of the class room. An electronics engineer on the parent teachers association for the school noticed and took an interest and offered me the chance of unpaid work experience at his employer, a large audio electronics company.

How did you get where you are?

I’m not sure & I envy people who manage to follow a dedicated career path! When I was at university I had a background in analogue instrumentation & wanted to work in audio but I could only get jobs in RF, when I wanted to go further in RF the 3G telecoms crash meant I could only get jobs in acoustic instrumentation. Now I have a job specialising in audio, acoustics & RF for the police in the UK which often proves to be challenging & requires political & people skills that engineers aren’t naturally equipped with.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

I’ve used a lot of expensive & cheap test equipment over the years and have come to the conclusion that you can live with most annoyances in test equipment but having cheap basic tools such as wire strippers or a soldering iron is an intolerable situation!

I have an eye glass I use all the time for checking PCB’s & I couldn’t live without a pair of wire strippers my father gave me, they look like an ugly & ineffective design I wouldn’t buy but looks are deceptive & they’ve never let me down.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

For simulation I think LTSpice and SciLab are excellent and superb value for money, but you always need to keep in mind that any model or simulation is only as good as the data & assumptions you feed it!

For design work I used to be an Orcad fan and I still believe its the quickest easiest tool for me to use to prototype a board but for more complex layouts particularly where RF is involved I’ve found that PADS is the unbeatable.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

It’s always the next one I come up against, once you’ve fixed a problem with a circuit it all becomes so embarrassingly obvious! The worst bug I’ve had was when I was working making tools for oilfield surveying, the hourly penalty fee for stopping drilling work on a customers site was a good motivator! One of the tools failed in a never before seen way for the field engineers performing the survey in a remote location & I had to work out what was wrong with it remotely, with a time difference and how we could fix it with what they had in the truck.

What is on your bookshelf?

Technically my bookshelf should be looking empty now as I’ve embraced a Kindle but I love my books & currently I would recommend:

The Art of Electronics (Horowitz and Hill)
Designing Audio Power Amplifiers (Bob Cordell)
Introduction To Electroacoustics and Audio Amplifier Design (William Leach)
High Frequency Techniques (Joseph White)
Hackers (Steven Levy)

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

On amplifiers in particular I find fingers are invaluable! If it doesn’t work poke at components and traces with your fingers and if it does work poke at them anyway to see how stable they are. On RF PA’s I’ve been known to use a pair of soldering tweezers to slide components up and down the transmission line to see how manufacturing placement tolerances may damage an amplifier by impedance mismatch.

Remember how your design will be used in real life, it’s easy to design a functional circuit in a nice clean lab but it’s another to design a circuit which will function when being abused by the uncaring end user.

Finally, I never go anywhere without crocodile clips, I always seem to find a use for them particularly when soldering.

What has been your favorite project?

I don’t know about my favourite but my most memorable was when a company asked me to do a contract design for a headset & communications device with certain unusual features. I didn’t know at the time what it was for but shortly after I took my wife to see a large well known illusionist in London, as he came into the crowd for a volunteer he picked the person next to me and I clearly saw he was wearing my headset design. If he’d picked me I have no idea how I could have answered the questions he asked honestly or got off the stage without causing either of us an embarrassment. The design worked perfectly, he got a standing ovation and my wife became impressed by what I get asked to do for a living!

What has been your most pointless project?

I had to do a heck of a lot of EMC testing to prove to a manufacturer that THEIR test system was suitable for testing a radio infrastructure THEY provided and that THEY had sold the test system to measure. When they got results they didn’t like the test system wasn’t supposed to be used in the way we were using it, it was an obvious stalling tactic & after many hours of EMC testing it turns out the test system was working well within tolerances and they had to address the actual problem!

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

I was installing a system I’d designed in an old building & had taken the normal precautions & isolated & padlocked the mains, as I was working I was leaving my tools on top of a conveniently placed perforated metal case on the wall. As I reached for my screwdriver by the plastic handle there was an almighty flash and ear splitting bang – the building had a large array of car batteries as a backup power supply we didn’t know existed and the breakers were not on the main switchboard. The blade of the screwdriver was completely missing, whilst the system was supposed to be isolated & safe it wasn’t, that experience was enough to convince me that you respect electricity & double check everything and if possible work on nothing larger than an AA battery!

What are you currently working on?

Currently most of my work is on preparing radio systems and interfaces for the Olympics, both for the venues and for the vehicles which will be travelling to & from the events.

Anything else you’d like to do?

My first properly paying engineering job was in instrumentation for a pharmaceutical company, I’m an Insulin controlled diabetic and since I was considering mentioning a insulin pump or blood tester as my favourite hardware I’d quite like to work for one of the manufacturers to see if I could make a difference to people like me who have to live with the condition.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

Convergence is still a big buzzword in my industry, and typically this involves making fewer things do more functions in a poorer way. The converged ‘virtual’ devices have to then share the same physical battery which results in a shorter runtime & less satisfaction with the product.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

I & (I guess) many others of my generation look back at the work done by guys at Bell Labs, and the early chip pioneers and think … Wow! These days most companies have downgraded engineers & gotten rid of R&D that made them innovative products & money to replace them with accountants & MBA’s who are only interested in what they can cut. Similarly it no longer seems to be about getting a properly functioning good product to market but who can get something to market quickest. I see turning those problems around as being a big issue particularly in terms of recruitment & retention of staff to the engineering profession let alone to individual companies.