121–130 of 160 posts
Indeed, the dark arts of RF engineered components persist long after other technologies change. Mostly, expensive tools became more accessible like TinySA, LiteVNA64 and NanoVNA. For the amateur Ham hobby, it has been a bit of a golden age with https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/
I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did. You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far fa…
It’s funny because I always tried to go into hardware side but I get pulled into the software or software and integration. I got myself learning fpga and pcb and all, tried to get into an exclusive hardware role, never got the chance, it also make things worse if you are in Canada since hardware opportunities aren’t that much, and either they have the hardware title but all you do is barely designing (for example, I…
There was never a decline in RF engineering demand, it's actually going up massively. But not in the US, Canada, Sweden... all the work is in China. It will actually be impossible to catch up with China on RF unless the US and Europe legislate for IP (not manufacturing!) to originate in the West. No Huawei 5G, no cheap Chinese SDN/ethernet, etc. Core switching and 5/6G edge. Remove patent protection for 5G designs.
I always wanted to get into RF design, but couldn't find it within the mega company I work for (we integrate more than we design at the component level). RF design has always been a bit of black magic, even as an EE. Other than some really great books from ARRL in the amateur radio arena, I haven't found too many good "as it really works in the working world" references. Can anyone point at any good books and/or site…
I've come full circle, and it is amazing how much has changed since I've last worked with anything in this field. Frequencies and a degree of precision and insight that you could have only dreamed of on a normal person's budget in the 80's are now easily attainable and combined with some knowledge of software there isn't a whole lot you can not do that you can think of, as long as it is physically possible and you ha…
As a Ham, RF engineering seems interesting, but there's really not much for job prospects. Glassdoor shows 125k Software Engineer jobs and 7k RF Engineer jobs in the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession. I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". Well, I don't, I love it, and have my entire life, and imagine I'll continue to as long as they will let me... More relevantly to the article and comment we're replying…
> I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". For personal stuff? Sure. But I certainly get why people get burned out on corporate programming. It's either tedious busywork following orders designed by architects whose last time writing code was 30 years ago and they never learned anything ever since, waterfall with…
Electricians might be temporarily safe from AI but EEs are knowledge workers too.
Author here :) glad this sparked some discussion. A few folks raised the geographic scope and consumer RF side, which are fair things to flag. I tried to cover automotive, 5G, and IoT in the piece, though looking back at this, I could've framed the opening more clearly, as it was more a gut feeling specific to my US aerospace / defense experience rather than a universal claim. That context should've been clearer from…
Since you're here, to calibrate my LLM detector, it'd be great if you could say whether or not you used an LLM to write parts of the article.
That's a pretty big clue that it is LLM assisted at least. That said, I don't mind. The article has substance and other than a few LLM markers like that, I think it's well-written.