To My Readers



If this is the first time you're visiting my blog, thank you. Whether you're interested or just curious to find out about PCB reverse engineering (PCB-RE), I hope you'll find something useful here.

This blog contains many snippets of the content in my books to provide a more detailed overall sampling for my would-be readers to be better informed before making the purchase. Of course, the book contains more photos and nice illustrations, as evidence from its cover page. Hopefully, this online trailer version will whet your appetite enough to want to get a copy for yourself.

Top Review

I started doing component level repair of electronics with (and without) schematics more than 40 years ago, which activity often involves reverse-engineering of printed circuit boards. Although over the years my technical interests have shifted into particle beam instrumentation, electron microscopy, and focused ion beam technology fields, till this day——and more often than not——PCB repairs have returned multiple multi-million-dollar accelerators, FIB, and SEM instruments back to operation, delivering great satisfaction and some profit.

Many of the methods described by Keng Tiong in great details are similar to the approaches I've developed, but some of the techniques are different, and as effective and useful as efficient and practical. Systematic approach and collection of useful information presented in his books are not only invaluable for a novice approaching PCB-level reverse engineering, but also very interesting reading and hands-on reference for professionals.

Focus on reverse engineering instead of original design provides unique perspective into workings of electronics, and in my opinion books by Keng Tiong (I've got all three of them) are must-read for anybody trying to develop good understanding of electronics——together with writings by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill, Phil Hobbs, Jim Williams, Bob Pease, Howard Johnson and Martin Graham, Sam Goldwasser, and other world's top electronics experts.

Valery Ray
Particle Beam Systems Technologist

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

E-2C Ahoy!

Pioneers of the E-2C Squadron, after 25 years

Upon completing BMT, I was posted to the Airforce Engineering Training Institute—AETI, as everyone called it. After the physical exhaustion of BMT, the mental engagement of AETI was a relief, a return to familiar territory. By the end of the year, my academic performance had been noted. I was earmarked for something special: the E-2C program.

Initially, I was being considered for its radar team. Through rotational posting around different squadrons during my OJT, I distinguished myself as someone apt in building test circuits and operating test equipment. Then someone from the E-2C's ATE team pulled out. I became the replacement choice.

It was May 1986. I had been in the Air Force for nearly two and a half years. I had learned radar theory, built a test fixture, and studied a sophisticated ATE system. Now I was about to embark on the next step.

Together with my teammates, I was flown to the United States for a six-month training stint. Our destination: the Grumman Aerospace facilities, where the E-2C Hawkeye was designed and built. Our purpose: to learn two of the most advanced ATEs Grumman had ever created—the CAT-3D and the RADCOM.

Six months passed in a blur of learning and discovery. When I returned to Singapore, I was not the same technician who had left. I had seen the cutting edge. I had touched it, studied it, made it part of myself. I understood automated test equipment at a level few others did. 

The year was 1987. It was one of the best times of my career life.


 

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