Retrofitting

Retrofitting is the process of adding new features, components, or systems to an existing product—features that were not part of the original design. One of the most significant retrofitting project I've done in my twenty-fives years with ST Electronics is upgrading the disc drive system on the RADCOM test station for the Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF).

Believe it or not, the RADCOM test programs—the very heart of its ability to diagnose E-2C avionics—were stored on magnetic cartridges. Not hard drives as we know them today. Not solid-state memory. Magnetic cartridges, about the size of a three-stacked 15-inch pizza, mounted in an HP7906 disc drive and run off an HP1000 host computer.

Over time, the disc access heads of the HP7906 drive built up ferrite dirt. Microscopic particles, accumulated through normal operation, clinging to the heads that read the magnetic media. And when those dirty heads passed over the cartridges, they could cause a head crash—the read head literally scraping against the magnetic surface, scratching it, destroying the data.

It happened more often than anyone liked. Cartridges that had worked for years suddenly became unreadable. Scrap. Trash. Years of test programs, lost to a few microns of ferrite dust. The RSAF was desperate. They had approached Grumman Aerospace—the original equipment manufacturer—for help. Grumman came back with an interim upgrade solution. Price tag: 1.5 million US dollars.

The RSAF project manager reached out to us. After researching for alternative solutions, we decided on the magneto-optical (MO) drive. It uses laser and magnetic technology together, writing data to discs that were far more robust than magnetic cartridges. No head crashes. No ferrite dirt. No scratched media. More importantly, it could be configured to emulate older storage devices. To the host computer, it would look exactly like an HP7906 disc drive. The system wouldn't know the difference. The test programs would load and run exactly as before.

Over the following months, we transferred hundreds of test programs from their vulnerable cartridges to the robust MO discs. Each migration was verified. Each program was tested. By the end, the entire RADCOM test suite lived on media that wouldn't scratch, wouldn't crash, wouldn't fail. 

The cost to the RSAF? Less than half of what Grumman had asked.

The project manager called me after the final acceptance to personally thank me. I appreciated the sentiment. But the real reward was seeing those MO drives spin up day after day, month after month, never losing a single byte of data.

Another obsolescence issue resolved—this time through retrofitting.

Ps: You can read the details and more in my latest book, A Memoir of Electronics, Discoveries, and a Life Less Ordinary by clicking on the book title.

The System Whisperer

The term came from my colleagues, not from me.

I never thought of myself as anything special. I was just an engineer who paid attention, who cared about the work, who refused to give up when problems seemed insurmountable. But somewhere along the way, people started noticing.

Not because I had any magical powers. Not because I could commune with machines through some mystical connection. Simply because I had learned, over years of patient work, to listen. To observe. To understand what the equipment was telling me, even when it spoke in subtle signals and obscure error codes.

Every system has a language. Most people only hear the silence when it works and the noise when it breaks. The whisperer learns to hear the conversation in between.

The systems I've worked with over the years—the RADCOM, the Factrons, the Teradynes, the WesTest, the countless boards and units and assemblies—they all have stories to tell. My job was simply to hear them.

And sometimes, to whisper back.

 

Ron's Way

No matter how urgent some jobs may require our immediate attention, Ron would always insist on finishing the task on hand first. This seemed counterintuitive at first. When a commander makes a direct request, doesn't everything else stop? Isn't that how the military works?

Ron had a different perspective.

"If I drop everything every time someone asks for something," he explained once, "I'll never finish anything. And unfinished work creates more problems than urgent requests solve."

But he wasn't rigid about it. He had a system.

He had served overseas attachments in Japan, learning from technicians whose approach to craft bordered on the spiritual. He had worked in the repair bay of an aircraft carrier, where space was tight, resources limited, and the stakes as high as they get. He had done tours back in US military airbases, seeing how different units organized the same work.

He had seen more than any of us young technicians. And he had learned, from all of it, how to handle both people and work with clarity and confidence.

That's something I learned from him. Close up. As his personal apprentice. 

The Zen of Work

Before I move on to the next phase of my life's journey, I want to dwell a little on the work philosophy I developed during those Air Force years.

Not the technical skills—those I've already described. Not the equipment or the procedures or the test programs. Something deeper. Something that would prove more valuable than any technical certification.

The mindset.

The way of approaching work that transforms pressure into purpose, chaos into clarity, mundane tasks into meditation.

The Zen of the workbench.

If we approach work as just a means for livelihood—a necessary evil, something to be endured until we can go home and live our real lives—then every task becomes a burden. The backlog feels oppressive. The duties feel pointless. The pressure feels personal. We feel miserable. We perform poorly. We confirm our own worst expectations.

But if we keep our heads cool and level, something shifts. The same tasks, the same pressure, the same demands—they don't disappear. But our relationship to them changes.

We can always find a silver lining in the midst of chaotic work situations and personal conflicts. Not by pretending the chaos isn't there, but by recognizing that chaos is just information. It's telling us something about priorities, about resources, about what truly matters.

This wasn't wisdom I was born with. It was something I learned—from Ron. 

Mr. Ronald Paul Dykeman

Ron's coffee mug

Ron was, quite simply, one of the most experienced and meticulous engineers you could ever find. He had been with Grumman for decades. He had worked on the E-2C since its early days. He knew the RADCOM the way a master craftsman knows his tools—intimately, completely, with a depth of understanding that came from years of hands-on work.

But experience alone doesn't make a great teacher. Ron had something more: patience. The willingness to explain something five different ways until it clicked. The ability to stand back and let you make mistakes, then guide you through understanding why they were mistakes. The quiet confidence that came from knowing he didn't need to prove anything.

He didn't give answers. He gave directions. He taught us to think like diagnosticians, not just button-pushers. He taught us to understand the systems, not just operate the equipment. It was the best education I ever received.

Ron taught me about radar and communications and automated testing. But he also taught me something else: that the best teachers are also human beings, with humor and warmth and the ability to laugh at themselves.

I carried both lessons forward. 

The American Apprenticeship

January 1987. A New Squadron.

We were the pioneer batch. That phrase carried weight. It meant there were no precedents, no seniors to guide us, no established procedures to follow. Everything we did would be done for the first time. Every success would become a template. Every mistake would be a lesson for those who came after.

My team, the ATE group, was assigned to the third-line repair bay, along with two other teams. Third-line meant deep maintenance—the most complex repairs, the ones that required removing systems from the aircraft and bringing them to a dedicated facility. It was the highest level of technical work in the Air Force, and it was ours.

Our new home was a bomb-proof shelter, designed to survive attacks that would level ordinary buildings. The shelter was empty when we first saw it. A shell. A promise. Nothing more. We had three weeks to turn it into a functioning repair facility. Those weeks were a blur of physical labor and logistical coordination.

Once the facilities were ready, we waited. For the arrival of the CETS.

A specialized team of personnel from Grumman Aerospace, the company that had designed and built the E-2C. Their mission: to assist us in running the squadron for the first two years of its operation. To train us, guide us, ensure that we could do the work before they left us to do it alone.

Our ATE team split into two groups. One would handle the CAT-3D, the general-purpose test system. The other would take the RADCOM, the specialized system for radar, communications, and more. I was assigned to the latter. And I was fortunate—more fortunate than I knew at the time—to be placed under the guidance of a man named Ronald Dykeman.

 

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.