Founders: Bernie Thompson and Neal Pederson
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Bernie Thompson is a graduate of Lincoln Tech and he owns a ten-bay repair facility in Albuquerque, NM. Twenty five years of hands on experience and a burning desire to master the challenging and exciting field of automotive electronics pushed Bernie to begin designing better diagnostic and training equipment. In 2001, he and Neal Pederson established Automotive Test Solutions, Inc. a company that designs and manufactures innovative top of the line training and diagnostic equipment. Neal is an electrical engineer/computer programmer who has experience designing control systems for equipment ranging from particle accelerators to nuclear reactors. Together, Bernie and Neal have released patented and proven technologies that have been recognized by Motor Magazine's prestigious Top 20 Awards.

Realizing the need for better education in his field, Bernie developed an advanced training curriculum for the automotive industry. In addition to publishing articles in Motor Magazine (Dissecting Fuel Injector Waveforms, January 2005; Ignition Waveforms, May 2005, in press), Bernie has presented workshops at automotive conferences including NACAT, Vision, and CATS. He was a presenter at TST last year and he is looking forward to again sharing with TST members his dynamic ideas on automotive electronics.
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Neal Pederson graduated in 1992 from Northwestern Polytechnic University with a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering with a 3.94 GPA. Neal spent the years from 1990 to 1995 developing control systems for the pulsed power industry. Neal has owned and operated VI Control Systems since 1995. VI Control Systems develops computer based custom control and data acquisition systems for high tech company's around the world and for the National Laboratories at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore. Control systems developed by Neal include computer based controls for high energy lasers, linear particle accelerators, and nuclear reactors. Test systems developed by Neal range from rocket engine testers for NASA to automated wafer test systems for the semiconductor industry.