A PIONEER in radio communications, John Bray was head of communications systems at the Post Office (now BT) at a time when its Goonhilly Earth station, on the Lizard, made one of the great technical breakthroughs of the second half of the twentieth century. On July 11, 1962, Goonhilly — now the largest operational satellite station in the world — received the first live television signals via the world's first commercial satellite, Telstar, from the USA.

In those moments, the predictions of the great science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke came true. In 1945 he had anticipated that microwave radio signals could be sent up to an unmanned orbiting satellite and beamed back to a different part of the world.

William John Bray was born in 1911 in Fratton, Portsmouth. In his teens he was already making crystal sets and inventing more complex devices to teach himself the fundamentals of radio engineering, before entering the Royal Naval Dockyard, Portsmouth, as an apprentice in 1928.

From there, in 1932, he won scholarships to the City and Guilds Engineering College, part of Imperial College London, where he graduated in 1935. Later that year he joined the BPO, as it then was, as an assistant engineer. In 1936 he moved to the radio experimental branch. There, during the war, he helped in the development of the multiple-unit steerable antenna that enabled Churchill and Roosevelt to communicate regularly without the Germans listening in.

After the war he headed the inland radio branch, developing microwave communications. In 1961 he was appointed the PO’s head of communications systems. His involvement in the standards-setting work of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) led in 1963 to an agreement that has set the standards for telephone, television and microwave radio-relay systems worldwide. In 1965 he was appointed the Post Office’s director of research and moved with the research laboratories to Adastral Park, Martlesham, in Suffolk.

During his career he initiated and contributed to a wide range of new services, from the development of TV licence detector vans in 1952 to the commissioning of Goonhilly ten years later. Goonhilly now handles millions of international phone calls, e-mails, and TV broadcasts simultaneously. Bray was appointed CBE in 1975, when he retired.

His other varied roles included acting as a consultant to the UK Council for educational technology, visiting professor at University College London, and external examiner for the MSc in Communications at Imperial College.

Bray’s wife, Margaret, died in 1998. He is survived by a daughter. Another daughter predeceased him.

John Bray, CBE, Director of Research, Post Office, 1966-75, was born on September 10, 1911. He died on September 6, 2004, aged 92.