United Kingdom Calibration Capability

The technical "breadth and depth" of our British service operation

Our Service Center at Winnersh, near Reading, Berkshire is one of the largest commercial operations of its type in the world, having around 90 technical and supporting staff. The quality management system is certified by KEMA against ISO9001 and also complies with the calibration management standards ISO10012  and ANSI/NCSL-Z540. There are extensive UKAS-accredited (ISO/IEC17025) measurement capabilities.

Large-scale use of automated systems enables efficient and thorough calibration and in addition to the ability to handle large volumes of equipment, state-of-the-art test gear provides a capability ranking amongst the best available. All measurements are, of course, traceable to national standards. Usually this is the UK NPL but some millimetric wave standards are linked to the US NIST and "photonics" (fiber optic electronics) parameters to the German PTB.

The following parameters are covered:- DC/AC Voltage, DC/AC Current, DC/AC Resistance, AC/DC Transfer, Distortion, Spectral Intensity, Capacitance, Inductance, Dissipation Factor, Impedance, Short Term Stability, Frequency/Period, Time Interval, Pulse Characteristics, RF/microwave Power, Directivity, Calibration Factor, Attenuation, VSWR/VRC/Return Loss, Noise/ENR, Phase Angle, Phase Noise, Frequency/Amplitude/Phase Modulation, Optical Power/Attenuation/Delay, Wavelength, Temperature

Examples of our Premier-level Facilities

"Pushing back the frontiers...."

• Cesium beam (primary) frequency standard with timekeeping accuracy known to be better than 1 second in 32 thousand years! An example of the famous HP/Agilent atomic clock as used to maintain Greenwich Mean Time and most other national and international timescales.
• Resistance standards at decade intervals from 100 millionths to 10 million, million ohms.
• The world's first microwave (26GHz) network analyzer-based capability to be accredited under an international measurement competency scheme.
• Collaboration with NPL on developments such as traceability of GPS-disciplined oscillators.
• Attenuator calibration down to -110dBm with uncertainty of a few milli-dB.