Early 1997 ADX Electronics was approached to provide the business infrastructure and bulk of the development for a "DC Electronic Load" product, by an old colleague of mine. The idea was to manufacture this product for a local telecommunications power supply manufacturer (a company he also happened to work for). It was an enormous development, which took years, and a 5 figure investment. A company was set up for the product's manufacture and sale (as it says on the product page below).

Mid 1999, manufacturing was pretty much fine-tuned and my input ready for some pay-back, but the business was being pulled in two directions - my business partner refusing to let me inform our main customer of his identity - that sort of thing, while I wanted to take a more open and down to earth approach, with our customers at least - leaving the creativity to the design. Who can say who was right.

At that stage the unthinkable happened. My business partner stole the bulk of our company's stock, plant and equipment, and set up a competing company - to manufacture an identical product and sell the completed stock. He falsified meeting minutes. He had the company's workers rename product drawings. He even copied my product documentation practically verbatim, save for a name and date change, and published it on the web as his own. The list goes on, and on, and on. The situation remains unresolved to this day.

This is a common story in business. Company law does not actually protect you like criminal law does. You have to pay to get it to work for you, no matter how clear cut your case is. If the bulk of your case centres around an intellectual property claim, with only a few tens of thousands of dollars of physical stock involved, the costs of recovery may very well be uneconomic.

However the product was good. And like any other product I developed on my own time, I still own what I did. The following is the Electronic Load page as it was left at the stage the company was formed to manufacture and sell it, only the navigation links have changed. More may be added as time permits, becuase it remains a product with great potential.

This load was designed for use by telecommunications equipment manufacturers and suppliers, with solid, dependable performance in mind. The benchtop version pictured below is conservatively rated at 60A at 60V continuous (40°C ambient), it can be strapped for operation at 60V/60A or 30V/120A. We also offer a version with relay switching, selectable CC/CP/CR/CV modes, and full remote control. Minimum load resistance is 0.8 ohms in 60V configuration (example: max current at 40V is 50A) - ideal for telecommunications test purposes. Contact us for a 19" rack mount ATE version with SCPI serial control.

benchtop electronic load (prototype)

• Download an example product datasheet in .PDF format. Note this was a custom model from one of our preproduction runs.