Ron Bradbrook – Past President

We regret to report the death of veteran Ron Bradbrook on 20 November.  Ron was our President in 2010/11.

The funeral will be at Chelmsford Crematorium on Thursday 11th January 2018 at 1-30 pm.

Ron was born in Barking and moved early on to Writtle. After the benefits of the local school he passed the exams to attend Chelmsford Technical College. A group from the college, including Ron, joined Marconi’s as craft apprentices in 1947. During his apprenticeship he did his National Certificate studies at the Tech.; he had spells at Pottery Lane, Hut 3 at Baddow, Writtle and the dreaded Building 46 in New Street.

After National Service he rejoined Marconi as a development engineer and found himself in Building 46 working for a very fine senior engineer, Douggie Bowers. This is where high powered transmitters started to take over his working life.

Having joined Marconi’s in 1947 his career almost covered the whole era of high power radio transmitters just missing out on the coming into service of the 100kW SWB-18 in 1940.

Ron was closely associated with the development of the BD 272 the first one of which became Sender 93 at Woofferton. In the nineties he undertook the early design work on what was to be Marconi’s last HF transmitter, the 500kW B6132, but retired before it went into service.

Ron was also the senior Marconi engineer responsible for the design of the equipment for the BBC’s re-engineering of its UK MW network of transmitters in 1977 using the 50kW B6034 as it basic building block and for the modification of this transmitter in 1986 to long wave as the B6046 for use at Westerglen and Burghead. At about this time he also was responsible for the overall design of the 10kW B6525 and 20kW B6526 FM transmitters that formed the backbone of the re-engineering of the BBC’s network.

However, this range of activities needed an authoritative voice that could cut through the problems and make a decision. Ron was that man in Building 46.

He encouraged those who tried and put their best efforts into the job and brought the best out of his close associates but he did not have much time for those that did not pull their weight for Marconi’s.