MIL/DO testing solutions for Teslab, Italy
In the heart of Italy’s military activities, we recently delivered a brand new chamber for Teslab that complies with MIL-STD-461 and DO-160 standards. Why a third chamber? Uliana Trucchi, Senior Technical Consultant at Comtest Engineering, states: “Teslab is a highly successful and fast-growing test facility, founded in Livorno, Tuscany, about thirty years ago by three brilliant men. One of them is Giorgio Romano, my primary contact during this project.
15/04/2025
Why is Comtest Engineering founder Hein de Groot holding a table tennis bat in this 1988 photo? This year, we are celebrating our 40th anniversary, and every five weeks, we share a bit of Comtest’s history.
Hein de Groot: “I started the company in a small office in my home, but in 1989, we needed to move to a real office building. I wanted to increase our brand awareness in the region, so I asked a friend who works in sports journalism for advice. Soon, we discovered that big sports require big budgets, and he told me that table tennis in the Netherlands is gaining popularity and is more affordable.”
At the time, Dutch table tennis legend Bettine Vriesekoop, born near the Comtest office, became the European Champion in 1982, igniting the sport’s popularity.
Hein: “We asked Holland’s number two player, fellow Olympic competitor, and 14-time Dutch champion, Mirjam Kloppenburg, to work for us and join the local table tennis club, Scylla Leiden. We created a magazine called Matchpoint, for which we designed a logo featuring a bat for the letter “O” and a line representing a bouncing ping pong ball, as a variant of our first company logo. Of course, we placed a table in the office, and sometimes visiting clients challenged Mirjam to a game. They stood no chance against her…”