Karting

This weekend, we discovered a karting track in Riyadh. We were 18 people, did qualifying and a 20 minutes race. Definitely going again!!

Cool dogs

Picture taken recently, somewhere on the highway outside of Riyadh. If the picture is not funny enough on its own, I can add that it was taken while the pick-up was overtaking us driving on the left emergency lane (which is actually no lane) at at least 160km/h. And this was just the first time we were able to capture it on camera, it's far from being the first time we see such maneuvers. And the dogs, comfortable as they look, must also have seen it before...:)

Hannover - Factory Acceptance Test SDH

After a week in Portugal and 3 days in Germany, I'm now back to Saudi, where the temperatures are perfect now, which feels great after 3 days in snowing Germany.

In Hanover, we ran a series of tests in the premises of the SDH equipment manufacturer (which I cannot name for confidentiality reasons), with the purpose of validating a number of technical requirements. Our final customer (Saudi Railway) sent a delegation to witness the tests and I represented Thales.

The SDH network is the core network, the network over which all other systems/networks of this new railway will run, and is the system I am responsible for. SDH stands for Synchronous Digital Hierarchy and is a circuit switched approach to networking, opposite to IP which is packet switched. SDH is widely used in mission critical applications, such as railway signalling, power utilities, etc. In total, more than 200 SDH ADM's (Add&Drop Multiplexers) will be deployed in this network, over an extent of 2400km using fiber optics, providing STM-16 (2,5Gbps) to the other 15 systems and sub-systems in this project.

The tests ran smoothly and were all approved by Thales and, more importantly, by Saudi Railways.