Alan Blake
Born 1943

Alan trained as a pilot back in the 1960’s and for a number of years worked as an airline pilot. He flew Vanguard, Comet and Viscount aircraft finally retiring prematurely as a Trident Captain when a medical condition put an end to his career.

Pilot training involves a study of meteorology and it is a subject in which he has maintained an interest to the present day.

After his flying career Alan became involved in computers and specialised in setting up business accountancy programmes and this led to writing bespoke software for businesses where commercial software was not available.

Alan moved to Cornwall in 1987 and worked for several companies as an accountant and semi-retired in 2008.

His interest in the weather prompted the purchase of a small weather station and it was this that aroused the inventor in him when he realised that there was a missing element in the weather recording data. What was needed was a simple and affordable method of measuring sunshine duration.

Using scrap materials, light bulbs and a light sensitive switch kit the first sun recorder was born.

Ole Jul Larsen
Born 1942.

Ole started his career in the electronics world in the Royal Danish Air Force – specifically he trained as a radar technician and stayed in the air force for almost ten years on an early warning radar station.

Leaving the air force in 1969 he joined a company producing sophisticated medical instruments and was then moving from ‘far behind state of the art electronics’ all the way up to the front.

Since then he was with a couple of companies dealing with marine electronics until retirement in 2004.

Ole is from the generation where autodidact still had a value and in the mid seventies he had the first experiences with software in terms of a very primitive Basic system.

Since then he has made quite a few software solutions in assembler and Basic – in later years using Visual Basic.

In September 2009 he came across the Cumulus weather forum and observed Alan’s genius idea although it took a while before he fully understood the principle of operation.

In the forum Alan made a cry for help from somebody with experience in electronics and programming – Ole became interested and a long cooperation was initiated resulting in the now available Blake-Larsen Sun Recorder.