John French Biography

Owner and General Manager John French has an excellent pedigree in the professional communications industry.  John initially left school at 16 to join the Merchant Navy College at Greenhithe to become a Radio Officer, and then moved on to studying at Plymouth Polytechnic before starting in the 80’s at “Dymar Electronics” alongside Mike Atkins, Alan Hudson, Ken Rumbold, Ron Trimmer, Stuart Pile and many others who cut their teeth alongside the superb engineering skills led by JT Murasko, inventor of “quasi synchronous transmission”.

Dymar was bought out by Burndept Electronics in around 1983 and the Watford factories were closed.  John then moved to “Communique”, based in north London as their Service Manager, and moved to Maxon (first time round) for a more sales oriented role and responsible for troubleshooting and new developments until re-joining Communique as Technical Sales Manager. In 1991 John started working for himself as a “troubleshooter” and assisted many radio dealers and manufacturers throughout Europe develop and integrate new solutions including:

• The First Auriga Taxi Dispatch system
• Modifications to Philips (Simoco) radios for taxi integration
• Development of Fire Brigade tactical Repeaters for LFB
• Fire Intercom equipment for Commend
• Remote Control equipment for Taxi systems in Sweden

In 1993 John was "poached" to join Ascom Radiocomms as one of their Sales Managers responsible for large MPT1327 trunked radio systems, also developing the dealer market for Ascom's range of portables moving into Bosch Telecom when taken over and into Motorola when they acquired Bosch Telecom. After several years looking after the new developments for MPT1327 systems and a number of Police Forces, John was asked to re-join Maxon as National Sales Manager, responsible for the growth of Maxon products into the majority of Fire Services in UK as well as some large special projects for Government, Police and Councils.

John was asked a number of times to help some of the new Chinese manufacturers create openings in the UK and European markets and from there the rest is history.

Despite being a little "old school", John is always getting asked for his help with developing products - radio and non radio alike.