Mr. George Frederick, Wind Profiler Business Unit Manager, and Mr. Gary Zeigler, Wind Profiler Operations Manager, will be retiring from Vaisala at the end of summer 2005. George and Gary will both continue to work for Vaisala in a consulting capacity. Beginning July 1st, George will assume the role of Strategic Development Manager and Gary will assume the role of Project Manager. We wish George and Gary continued success in their new roles.
Mr. Ron Shellhorn will assume the role of Business Unit Manager as of July 1st and Mr. Marko Keskinen has accepted the position of Wind Profiler Product Manager, effective August 1, 2005. We wish them both success with their new responsibilities.
The Vaisala Wind Profiler Business Unit recently reached another important milestone in its delivery of a network of 482 MHz LAP®-16000 tropospheric wind and temperature profilers for the German Weather Service. A customer-witnessed Factory Acceptance Test for the last system of the three-profiler contract was successfully completed in Berlin on 18 May 2005. Site installation and final testing of this new profiler near Bayreuth, Germany, is scheduled to begin in July and finish in August. The two previous LAP®-16000 profilers delivered by Vaisala under this contract were installed near Ziegendorf, Germany, in 2003 and near Nordholz, Germany, in 2004. The 223 technical specifications levied by the customer under this contract challenged the Vaisala engineering staff involved, but they have all been met and the first two systems have been accepted by the customer. The challenging schedule has also been kept.