I enjoy and own my own business developing Audio announcement and Smart Metering technologies. I started with British Telecom and was apprentice of the year twice (this does not say much for the others). BT were very good employer & gave me a bursary to Portsmouth Polytechnic to read for a BSC in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. I was so grateful to BT for their fine apprenticeship, I repaid them by joining Marconi Avionics in 1975. where, as a junior engineer I worked on inertia navigation for the Jaguar aircraft and radar, Blindfire and DN181 missile systems. during my time with Marconi's Microproccesors came into the UK & I went on some very early training courses (Motorola 6800 mostly). I got on very well with the lecturer and after a while joined him in Opalport Electronics. somehow becoming one of the first government approved micropressor consultants in the 1980’s. Working on diverse systems; fruit machines, gold weighing systems (Royal Mint), Aircraft power metering for British Airport Authorities and even a GPS based Police tracking. An off-shoot of the airport power lead on to battery monitoring (time-to-run) which was used in odd places like New York buses, Nuclear power stations & NATS air traffic control. during the course of which I registered several Patents. The first PA (Public Address) system I did for an airport was at Gatwick in 1983 and became known as 'the Opalport', it is an early form of email & is still running there until we introduced a new system in 2013.One of our Automated PA systems starts & stops the four production lines at Toyota's Derby factory and has been doing so since 2000.Moving on I went into so called Smart Metering, with patents in Gas Meter reading device & Starter Battery Analysers.My latest large project was a fully automated Text-to-Speech system at Gatwick & has replaced all the human announcers with mobile (Android) tablets (62 languages).we developed for Utilitywise a new generation of Smart Meter.Recently we have been concentrating on automated PA for Airports, Stations, Ferries, Subways, Museums and public buildings etc.