About Us

MSB Design was established in 1980 to offer design services to the general electronics industry. Wide experience in the electronics sector gave a broad portfolio to the company.
After a few years MSB Design received a request from British Telecommunications to supply a custom item of test equipment, and when this was delivered to their satisfaction they soon ordered an additional item.

Seeing a need for Analog Telecoms Test Equipment for the Approvals test sector the company decided to invest their efforts full-time into expanding the range which started with those two items. That first unit was an Artificial Line, now named the AL-1. You will see the BT roots by the individual design of the enclosure. The second commisioned unit was a Ringing Test Generator, now named the RTG-1.

The range has expanded in what may be called a customer-lead fashion, which is smart speak for saying that as our customers asked for custom items, if we felt that they would be of use to other people we added them to our stock profile. This has brought us to the present day when the standard range numbers some 15 items and growing.

One spin-off from this work has been our little Ringing Generator that is designed to boost the effective REN value of a line. This is not really the correct terminology as the REN refers to the apparatus, but the essence of it is that if you have too many bells or appliances attached to a PSTN line there is a probability that one or more will not ring, due to the loading of the ring circuit. This can be overcome by regenerating the ringing locally, and that is what the RG1-c does.

The adding to our range by way of custom units lead to us specialising in that field :-

• we are always happy to discuss the modifying of our standard range to suit the particular needs of a customer. This might be as simple as changing the component values in our Artificial Lines to simulate differing cable properties ( the standard units represent 0.5mm Cu conductors ), or maybe a more complicated change invoving the addition of facilities not present in the standard product. In the case of component value changes there is generally no extra charge for this service.
• if the changes above would not produce the exact product needed then we undertake the custom design of a special test unit. In general this is not as expensive as might be feared, as the technology is usualy available in our other products and it is just a question of compiling different circuit fractions to yield the custom item. We don’t expect you to pay for us to reinvent the wheel, so generally we are able to charge at a very reasonable rate. In the event that the circuitry required is application specific, or the technology needed is new to us then we are still happy to undertake the work, and do so often, and for this we charge at our usual competitive rates.

All design work on our products is done in-house, and the production is also done here. PCB design, schematic and mechanical drawing are all produced on CAD systems, and frequent use is made of circuit simulation software to save design time. As it turns out these simulators are never fully accurate, so we always end up proving our designs, firstly on the breadboard, and then as a pre-production prototype. In this way we can be sure that the design will be accurate and reliable.