Consultant and visiting Professor at University of Leeds,
UK.
Dr. Ranson is the founder and Engineering Director of Radio System
Design a bespoke design and consultancy service specialising in
microwave communications technology. He received his Ph.D.
degree from the University of Leeds and has been in industry,
actively involved in research and development of microwave
components and systems for over 30 years.
He has been interested in radio from an early age. He obtained a
Class A amateur radio license at the age of 14 and has been
building and studying radios ever since. At university he
specialised in microwave engineering obtaining a PhD on the now not
so common topic of Transferred Electron Devices
Amplifiers.
His early work was on military systems, designing IFM and band
translators for ECM equipment at MEL, then a part of Philips
Electronics. He moved to the USA where he worked for AIL and
Watkins Johnson Co. As well as various converter and customer
specific products Dr. Ranson became a project leader on three major
microwave receiver developments. One was the first upconverting,
broadband microwave ELINT receiver employing an approximately 22
GHz first IF. The second was an innovative microwave impulse
receiver where he was responsible for the key filter designs and
the last was a very high dynamic range, triple conversion microwave
to baseband processor.
In 1996 Dr. Ranson returned to the UK as Subsystems Engineering
Director for Filtronic Comtek. There he grew the development team
and expanded the company business and capabilities in integrated
front end products. Prior to the most recent position Dr. Ranson
was Director of Wireless Research working with a team focused on
high efficiency power amplifiers for W-CDMA base stations. This has
produced innovative designs for single and multi-carrier linear
power amplifiers, employing large Filtronic GaAs pHEMTs and
achieving state-of-the-art power added efficiencies. Until recently
he was the Engineering Director of the Integrated Products Group of
Filtronic plc responsible for engineering across the four business
units in the group. This broad technology base ranged from
semiconductor device and MMIC development, through integrated
assemblies for point to point radios to advanced radar and ECM
sub-systems.
Dr. Ranson is a Fellow of both the IEE now IET and the IEEE. He is
a visiting Professor at Leeds University and has published
technical articles, organized and presented in MTT workshops and
presented numerous internal presentations and international
seminars. He was the Digest Editor for the 1996 MTT Symposium in
San Francisco, where he helped pioneer the publication on CD-ROM.
He is a member of the MTT-S 2010 Technical Program Committee, the
past Chairman of the MTT Technical Coordination Committee 20 on
Wireless Communications and a member of the Board of Directors for
the European Microwave Association (EuMA). He has also been an
Invited Editor for the Special Issue of the MTT Microwaves Letters
focussed on European wireless communications technology. In 2006 he
was the Technical Program Committee Chairman for European Microwave
Week and the General Chair of the ECWT.
Dr. Ranson has been a member of the CEI-Europe faculty since
2004.
Course #26
Radio System Design - Theory and Practice
Course #27
Advanced Radio System Architectures