Trevor Wadley

Trevor Lloyd Wadley was a South African electrical engineer of the 20th century. He was best known for his development of the Wadley Loop circuit for greater stability in communications receivers.

Born in Durban in 1920, Wadley trained at Howard College (now of the University of Natal) in his hometown, where he studied under Hugh Clark and Eric Phillips. He was known as a student for his habit of rarely, if ever, taking notes in lectures, due to his near-eidetic memory. During World War II, he was recruited into the Special Signal Services and trained on the British RADAR project.

After the war, Wadley joined South Africa's National Institute for Telecommunication Research, as a designer of radio equipment and instrumentation. He developed an ionosonde for measuring Earth's ionosphere, and a ranging Tellurometer. It was also here that he invented the Wadley Loop receiver, which allowed precision tuning over wide bands, a task which had previously required switching out multiple crystals. He also invented the tellerommeter which could measure up to a distence of 80km, it was used in land survaying. Today it is use in a wide range of equiment but modified with today technology.