Courtesy of Phil Perkins - 1958 to '60

My Life - after “The Tech”

I worked at Turners, in the Radio Products division, and after one holiday, with a friend, to Scotland, doing an amateur radio trip, I returned to Wycombe to find music interference on one of the amateur radio bands.

This led to me making a complaint, which in turn led to working on Radio Invicta - on the Red Sands Forts, in the Thames Estuary.

December 16th 1964 saw a sad incident with our boss, and 2 other friends, drowned. I should have been on that trip, had I not agreed to swap with one of the victims, so he could be home for Christmas.

The survivor guilt never leaves you. This, in turn led to working on Radio City, on the Shivering Sands Forts, - where our boss, Reg Calvert, was shot by Major Oliver Smedley - and sounded the death knell of Offshore Radio.

I finished up on Radio Caroline North, in Ramsey Bay, off the Isle of Man. There's loads of history if you Yahoo "Phil Perkins offshore radio".

Since 1981, "work" for me, was running a small firm based in Temple End known as Pervisell Ltd. My late mum, the founder, came up with the name by a combination of parts the names of the original other people as in PERkins daVIS and connELL.

Basically, we were deeply into all aspects of electronics. Initially we used to sub out the PCB artworks, in those days it was the good old black tape on the Mylar film, usually scaled 2:1 and all components on the great imperial 0.1” grid. I actually picked that up because, needless to say, it made us a few more pennies. The problem was that after you’d finished, you’d look at it next day and see how many improvements you could make, were it not so time consuming.

Needless to say, computer design of the circuit diagrams was a doddle to pick up afterdoing hundreds of hand drawn schematics.

The guy who did the tape and Mylar stuff, didn’t adapt as quickly as myself to the “newer” computer aided pcb layouts, but I persevered and was soon able to bring that in-house too. Moving bits and even blocks, on a screen, is so much easier than ripping up loads black tape and virtually starting again.

Our toilet, with the on-demand hot water was more politely called ‘the etching room’. Simply, it boiled down to not taking the risk of ordering professional pcbs from our (as was) Sangria, also in High Wycombe, until the design was proven to work, so we used to plot onto Mylar, with an olde FX80 Epson printer, later FX81 and lay that on pre-sensitised fibreglass circuit board and expose it to UV light so that we could etch it. It didn’t take long to work out that small runs (possibly up to 25) of boards could be made in house too. They weren’t tin played nor were they with plated through holes, as all of this was catered for in the original design. I really enjoyed those days as we also used to drill them manually, right down to 0.6mm holes without many broken carbide drills.

As time went on, we were doing a lot of work for bigger firms like Texas Instruments and Hasbro (the toy people). The biggest breakthrough was when a guy who was a friend of our original pcb designer,and was director of a queue barrier system manufacturer, asked if we could design a sequential queuing system. Our pcb design man, Alan, and myself completely designed and manufactured it and they sold them under the name of Q-trol. Alan did the hardware and I did the software. (I got into assembly language programming of both the 8048 and 8051 families of microcontrollers). We used to go and Install these all over the country for the Halifax Building Society. When we had got to doing around 100 of these, we were (dishonestly) approached by another director of a firm alleged to be quoting to Halifax, against our colleague. We were promised that should he get the order, we would then manufacture for him. I was younger and a bit naive then as it was all a ‘con’ to see our setup and pick up too much information so that he did in fact get the Halifax order, so that was the end of that.

You see varied designs from different manufacturers in banks and building societies all over the place now. They are all functionally the same as our first one on the market. Unfortunately, our man wouldn’t share development costs to start all over and with a much more cost effective model, so we gracefully parted company.

The next thing to come along was making what are known as G703 amplifiers both as single units and as 19” rack versions, also leading to G703 distribution amplifiers, which on a search engine will usually have www.pervisell.com in the top 10, often number 1. Sadly the requirements from the big boys like BBC and Post Office have dwindled to zero as I got into the late part of retirement around 3 years ago. In my opinion, the days of the small electronics companies are finished as there is neither need nor space for them now.

That’s the basic story after the good old offshore radio days and then returning to Wycombe and working at Turners Radio Products, Perkin-Elmer, Airmech, and one or two other local electronics places.

I have to admit that overall, I’ve always been happy wherever I’ve worked, and recommended to my two closest friends that they should never do a job that they don’t enjoy. Funnily enough they both attended Sir William Ramsey school and then went to the top of the hill JHGS.

I know it’s not really related to the school days, but it is proof of how my time at The Tech gave me so much confidence and the belief that if you are determined to anything, you can. Perhaps I should add that I've never been on one single course to learn about the umpteen processes that electronic design and assembly encompass; yet again, teach yourself / learn to do it properly, right from the start.

As far as knowing any of the old boys now, I’m afraid the answer is no. It does however remind me of some words from James Hilton's Lost Horizon to the effect of “schoolboys who meet up later on life have virtually nothing in common, unlike when at school together”.

I believe that I have made my place in history - but I shall be so very proud to see my name in “THE LIST OF “ALL KNOWN WYCOMBE TECH PUPILS”.