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Karl Snelling, Managing Director of GDS Instruments, recently returned from India where GDS exhibited alongside their Indian agent, Aimil Ltd, at the Indian Geotechnical Conference (GEOtrendz).The conference aim was to bring together professional engineers, academics, researchers, industrialists and others, with interest in Geotechnical Engineering. The conference hosted speakers from across the world and covered a number of Geotechnical subjects including, field testing instrumentation and monitoring, innovative techniques in ground improvement and recent developments in experimental Geotechnics to name just a few.

Friday 19th November, GDS Instruments took part raising money for Children in Need. BBC Children in Need is the BBC's UK corporate charity. The annual telethon aim is to help raise those crucial pennies needed to improve the lives of disadvantaged children and young people across the UK. The event see fundraiser all over the country take part in activates to raise money.

It was a cold Sunday morning as I headed off to meet up with my teammates from the newly formed “Team GDS”. So cold in fact, that I had to scrape the ice of my car! Team GDS is made up of James Hopkins, Nick Warren and Richard Brown, all staff here at GDS Instruments. Our challenge today though, was not to design/build/market a new piece of material testing equipment, it was to tackle the elements head on.

Discovery HD series “Mystery Investigator” sent Olly Steeds to Greece, to investigate the destruction of Atlantis. According to the philosopher Plato, Atlantis was an advanced civilization that sank beneath the waves. It was said to be out beyond the western headland where an immortal giant holds up the heavens by means of a pillar on his back. Plato maintained that Atlantis was a real place, not a myth. He in turn had heard of it from certain wise men of Egypt.

We had a great response to our competition, thank you for all your entries. It was a picture sent in from Igor Petrovic at the Faculty of Geotehcnical Engineering, University of Zabgreb that we choose as our winner, picture shown below...

GDS Instruments has launched its first training videos on You Tube. A 6 part ELDYN (Enterprise Level Dynamic Triaxial Testing System) training video is now available to view on our own You Tube channel. The training videos show, in real-time, how to set up the testing equipment with GDSLABS and perform a series of soil tests.

At GDS Instruments we are looking for some photos of our products, in your laboratory or field tests that, we can showcase on our website. We'd like to hear your experiences of us, our products, your ideas of improvements and future products.

There were over 1000 delegates at the conference and approximately 50 exhibitors. We hope that we saw you on the stand and that you had the opportunity to discuss the GDS product range with either Jerry or Dr Patrick Hooker, our Chairman and CEO. We were very pleased to be the only exhibitor with a working triaxial testing system on their stand. As can be seen from the photo we were exhibiting our new ELDyn 5/10kN, static to 5Hz electromechanical triaxial testing system complete with our 100mm dynamic triaxial cell. This system created a lot of interest with the delegates who visited the stand.

In October 2008 Jerry Sutton attended the 25th China National Symposium on Geotechnical Testing held in Hangzhou, China and hosted by Zhejiang University. While Earth Products China sponsored the main conference and then organised a GDS Users group to be held immediately after the conference for three days.

GDS Founder and Chairman, prize-winning geotechnical author, Dr Bruce Menzies, has had his new book, “A short course in geology for civil engineers”, published by Thomas Telford.