This week CEI organized another session of my Hands-On Characterization course in Dresden. A new group of enthousiastic engineers registered for the course. As could be expected the course is improving time after time. The feedback from the participants again was very positive, and that is a strong encouragement to continue in the same direction. This means further improvement of the course where necessary, and adding new measurement assignments to the course. New and additional equipment is already ordered to keep the course up to date !
Almost all of the participants succeeded in finding/measuring/calculating the conversion gain of the test-camera. Personally I do see this as the highlight of the course. That so many participants came to right value is a remarkable success, because it is not a really simple measurement to do. Making a Photon-Transfer Curve (PTC) seems to be fairly simple if you have some experience, but can be difficult if you have to do this for the first time. But once the participants have the knowledge of how to create a PTC, other measurements become simple as well. In many cases it is a matter of calculating averages and calculating standard deviations. It is just a matter of doing this things in the right order !
At this moment my Hands-On Characterization course is only organized by CEI. And up to now CEI is using 4 different course location : Barcelona, Copenhagen, Dresden and Cambridge. Unfortunately the transport of the equipment needed in the course is not so easy. Transporting by a courier is tricky because the equipment is pretty vulnerable, and tranporting by car (as I did up to now) takes a lot of time. For that reason CEI will organize the next Hands-On Characterization course in Amsterdam (in May 2012). This is much closer to my home, which makes the transport of the equipment much easier. Moreover, Amsterdam is also very easy to reach from all over Europe, making the travelling for the participants very smooth as well. Looking forward to see some of my readers in Amsterdam 😉
Albert, 16-11-2011.