EMC · Environmental Test · Space & Aerospace
Twenty years of making hardware prove itself.
I'm James Yates — Lead EMC Engineer at Leonardo, former laboratory director, apprentice-trained on a radar range in West Wales. This site shares the tools, calculators and plain-language explainers I've built across a career testing satellites, combat aircraft systems and everything between.
The work
Six sections. Real tools, plain language.
Every section pairs explanation with something interactive — calculators, visualisers, working demos. Plain language, no jargon walls, grounded in what actually happens on a test floor.
EMC
Field strength, receiver bandwidth, RF units, grounding & bonding — nine tools from real test work.
Enter → 02Antennas
Field regions, beamwidth digitising and an animated beam-coverage planner — the practical geometry of antenna test work.
Enter → 03Radar
The range equation, Doppler, PRF trade-offs and a working PPI display — fundamentals from first principles.
Enter → 04Space Qualification
Vibration, thermal and TVAC — how spacecraft hardware earns its ride, with test-planning calculators.
Enter → 05Management & Leadership
Apprentice to director: how we halved a lab's test turnaround time, building small teams, and accreditation done properly.
Enter → 06Personal
Land's End to John o' Groats, Spartan, five years in the Army Reserve and a parachuting habit — the rest of the story.
Enter →A belief, tested
The fixture, the harness, the procedure and the people are all part of the evidence.
— A lesson from a cracked vibration fixture, and every campaign since
Now
Leonardo, Edinburgh.
Leading EMC laboratory operations for next-generation radar and combat air programmes — expanding accredited scope, refining test methods, and building the tools that make good measurements easier to repeat. The best of what I learn ends up here.