Magnetometers – Over 50 Years of Combined Experience
Our Team:
The Billingsley Aerospace & Defense, Inc. team is comprised of engineers, technicians and operations staff from the original Billingsley Magnetics corporation.
Eva M. Wakefield is the president of the corporation as well as contract administrator and program manager for major programs. She has been working in this capacity for over 10 years and previously as Operations Manager for Billingsley Magnetics since 1994.
S.W. “Bill” Billingsley is our Director of Research and Development. In this capacity, he is the lead designer and principal engineer. Mr. Billingsley has been designing fluxgate magnetometers and magnetic instrumentation for nearly 50 years. Mr. Billingsley works solely on research, product development and design. As a result, Billingsley Aerospace & Defense remains the world leader in fluxgate magnetometer technology. Mr. Billingsley’s designs can be found protecting our harbors, in onboard degaussing systems for a Naval vessels, in satellite attitude control subsystems, in geophysical research applications, in laboratories for calibration and precision measurements, and even measuring the pipe wall thickness for our oil pipelines.
Our engineering team has extensive experience working on magnetic instrumentation, magnetometer manufacturing, testing and calibration; Helmholtz Coil manufacturing, testing and control; as well as software and firmware design for more than 20 years. This team builds all sensors in house and proudly boasts about making the finest, lowest noise, fluxgate magnetometer sensors commercially available today.
We design and produce ultra high-reliability fluxgate magnetometers, gradiometers and Helmholtz Coil systems. We perform the research and development necessary to push the state of the art in sensor sensitivity, stability, and low noise performance.
BA&D is widely recognized by respected members of the scientific community. For example, IBM’s Watson Research Center and the Czech Technical University in Prague , are working on separate collaborative research projects with BA&D to develop fundamental improvements in the fluxgate mechanism. Additionally, we have participated in SBIR programs in the past and are currently involved in the development of new instruments for DARPA.
In addition to our standard products, BA&D designs, develops and manufactures magnetic field instrumentation to customer’s specifications. We also perform environmental testing, magnetic site surveys, instrument recalibration services and technical consulting. Our fully integrated test laboratory is available for rental.
Our Laboratory
BA&D’s laboratory is located in Brookeville, Maryland. The facility is in a rural, magnetically quiet location that is ideally suited for precise magnetic measurements. Our facility is state-of-the-art, and is comprised of a 500 square foot “quiet laboratory” that is remote from the main building and an additional 1,800 square feet of lab and office space. The laboratory is completely equipped for assembly and characterization of magnetic sensors. It is highly automated and has three triaxial, closed loop servo controlled, Helmholtz Coil Systems; a 1 meter coil, and two 2.2 meter coils. This allows testing of large numbers of instruments rapidly, accurately and with complete reporting capabilities. The controllers maintain magnetic fields precisely at desired levels, even in the presence of large changes in the background magnetic field.