About Us...


What is Rider Technical Services?
We were established as a company in September, 2001 and was incorporated as an "S" Corporation in July, 2004. The company's President is Raymond Rider.

Rider Technical Services is a company that is involved in many technical support functions. We have a diverse customer base that ranges from the broadcasting industry to small business.

We can install new equipment and support existing on-air systems. We can help you with your FCC compliance by establishing a routine schedule to self-check operational procedures.

We can recommend new systems based on your requirements.

Your day to day operations can be periodically inspected by us to verify your broadcast facility is operating within FCC rules and regulations.

If you are a small business, we can install and maintain your Information Systems infrastructure. We can support your sever and workstation needs. We can install, expand and verify that your Local Area Network is operating at peak performance. If you have a need for a secure connection between the corporate office and remote facilities, we have the expertise to install and configure a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

We install PBX telephone systems. RiderTEK specializes in Nortel Systems. Call us for you business telephone needs.



The History of Rider Technical Services and How We Got Our Start
This section contains the history of Raymond Rider, including a short biography in his career that led to the formation of Rider Technical Services.

Mr. Rider has an extensive background in the electronics industry. He became fascinated with a neighbor's ham radio station at the age of 13. The idea of how someone could send Morse code across the world with a bunch of tubes, parts and wires captured his interest.

The high school where he attended had an extensive vocational area with an electronics shop. One has to remember that the world of electronics was not all that common in the late 1950's. Most electronic training in those days was learned in the military or in radio and TV repair shops. However, this progressive school had acquired a large inventory of W.W.II surplus control systems for radio controlled "drones". Each student was given one of these controllers to disassemble and convert to short-wave receivers and transmitters.

In 1957 there were no such things as PC computers, iPods, etc. Not even the transistor was in production in 1957; the transistor was only a laboratory experiment, developed in 1947 by John Bardeen, Willian Shockley and Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories. These three received the 1956 Physics Nobel Prize for their joint invention. Mr. Rider tells a story where he saw the transistor demonstrated at the Goodwin Institute in Memphis, TN in 1957. In the demonstration, the tiny transistor was only a small audio oscillator that had the power of a "gnat" as it was described. Over the next 15 years, this device was improved and scaled down in size to what is now known as the Integrated Circuit.

Upon finishing high school, Raymond Rider realized attending college was not financially possibe. The military electronics were growing at a very fast pace. Rider joined the U.S. Navy under an electronics program they offered. The Navy promised a "crack" at the electronics field providing your battery of scores indicated an aptitude for the field. Rider had a "head start" from his experience in his high school electronic classes". Rider attended the US Navy's Electronics School at Treasure Island, California. He said it was a very hard gig that lasted 42 weeks. From electronics school Rider was assigned to the US Naval Communications Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since Castro had closed down access to Cuba, there was not much to do except work on the many high power transmitters at the facility where he was assigned.

18 months later, Rider was assigned to Tactical Air Control Squadron 22 at Little Creek, VA. Because TACRON 22 was a mobile group, this assignment resulted in two Mediterranean cruises on first, the USS Monrovia, and then finishing his naval career on the USS Francis Marion. Both of these assignments provided him with plenty of opportunities to work on many types of electronic equipment found on ships. That equipment included RADAR and other navigation equipment.

A short time after leaving the military, Rider received a call from RCA Service Co. It seems RCA was looking for ex-military people to man the greatly expanding US missile and satellite tracking facilities known as the US Air Force Eastern Test Range. Rider was assigned to the Ascension Island station. He worked at the Transmitter Site. This site contained 100 KW transmitters that were necessary at the time for communications between the Cape Canaveral operations and all the "down range" tracking stations. There were no communication satellites during those days.

Rider tells a story about the Ascension Island Transmitter Site. Part of this story has to do with the differences between the Air Force and the Navy, and how they each deal with the repairing of electronic equipment. Ascension Island was an Air Force installation, managed by ex-Air Force personnel. The Air Force maintenance style is focused on a "black box" repair concept. The technicians in the field remove the black box and send it to the repair depot. The Air Force technicians do not require the same level of training as those in the Navy. A Navy technician in the middle of the ocean does not have the luxury of black box exchanges; this is why the Navy schools are twice as long as the Air Force. So, as the story goes, one evening a major transmitter system went down due to a faulty Exciter. The Master Oscillator was bad. The oscillator contained a "tiny" peanut tube buried deep within the Master Oscillator unit. Normally, the Air Force technician would never attempt to disassemble this unit. He would have ordered a replacement from the depot. As Rider tells the story, this was no big deal for him. He had replaced these tubes several times before while serving aboard ship. It was a fairly complicated job he tells. When his Ascension Island boss came to the site and saw that he had disassembled this unit into hundreds of parts, the boss was skeptical that it could be put back together. Such little faith these Air Force guys have. Before the end of the day, Rider had this system repaired and back on-the-air.

In 1966, Raymond Rider left Ascension Island to work as a Field Engineer for Picker Nuclear Corporation. Picker was a manufacturer of nuclear materials measuring and diagnostic equipment for both the commercial nuclear industry and nuclear medical systems. Picker also distributed Electron Microscopes in the US from one of its England subsidiaries. X-ray diffractometery was another product line used in the identification of unknown crystalline materials. Rider traveled an eight state region as a company representative, installing, repairing and consulting with customers.

Raymond Rider left Picker Nuclear in 1969 and became employed by the Federal Aviation Administration as a RADAR technician at the Memphis Air Route Traffic Control Center. During this 16 year tenure many changes took place at the Memphis Center. All of the analog RADAR equipment was replaced with digital processing systems. Rider had to shift gears once again and commence a 6 year training program in order to become qualified on the new system.

After a 3 year tour of duty with the FAA at the Washington, DC and Atlantic City, NJ development center. Rider left the employment of the Federal Government and began working as a Technical Advisor at Federal Express Corporation in Memphis, TN. Rider began at FedEx as the System Administrator for a large Tandem Computers based network used for the development of their ZAPMAIL product.

After leaving FedEx's ZAPMAIL project, Rider was assigned to a newly formed Quality Assurance Group. The Quality Assurance Group was formed as a direct result of FedEx loosing 10 Million dollars due to the failure of one of their billing systems not collecting a Saturday Delivery surcharge for 6 months. As Rider tells about this fiasco, no one was interested in developing software by using any accepted methodology. The management was more interested in getting the software loaded into the production machines under an "overnight" mentality. After all, that was how they delivered packages. Nor, was anyone willing to take the time to create documentation so both the programmer and the end user would understand what the system should be doing. According to Rider, the FedEx development process would not accept the basic Quality Assurance principles of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the world's noted quality guru, who turned Japan from a reputation of creating shoddy products, into a nation that now makes the best quality products in the world. Some of these Quality Assurance principles are so simple and common sense, you stand back and wonder why would they consider creating software without doing these simple things. First of all, every software development group should have a stable, production look-alike test system that is managed under strict Software Control System procedures. No person outside a qualified test group should be given access. Every software module revision loaded into the test system should call for a regression test to make sure the system is not polluted with bad code. As Rider recalls, he found it impossible to keep the programmers out of the test systems as they were given carte blanche to revise program modules as they saw fit.

Raymond Rider discovered unexpectantly a cruel management process at Federal Express. For some unknown reason he had exceeded his welcome to be employed at FedEx. Rider has always said he was in a "no win" position at FedEx. The senior management at FedEx had been replaced prior to his departure to accomplish one primary objective. This objective was to create a stable testing platform in order to prevent company embarrassment in releasing buggy software to both external and internal customers. Rider tells how he had the solutions to their problems. After all, he was doing the job he was directed to do. However, the senior management could not accept the embarrassments of him finding the problems he was asked to do. By bringing up these problems, his senior management looked bad before their peers. As Rider put it another way, what was the new management doing in this department? They would not follow his recommendations. At the same time they did not like the visibility created by their failure to listen to his solutions. Rider describes his experience at FedEx as a horrible episode in his work career. He is a person of high dedication who always wanted to do the job right. Rider said that he did not have that many jobs over his career; he did not bounce from job to job. That must say something about his work ethic with prior employers. He was a "company" man who believed in CEO Fred Smith's promise of fair treatment. Rider said, "Where was Fred Smith that day when I was rudely thrown out without any explanation?"

Every person has a dark moment in their life. Rider tells the story of how he sat on the sofa and stared at the wall for days on end, asking the same question over, and over, "What did I do?" One day he got up and realized he had done nothing wrong. He internally told himself to get up off his ass and forget these people. Someday they will be victims of their own devices.

Now, you know the story how Rider Technical Services was started. Rider did not need FedEx to continue living. He tells how each job was a learning experience. He said nobody could rob him of his mind. What he learned over the years is what Rider Technical Services is built on.



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