131–140 of 160 posts
What this article misses is that all that hardware is pretty much standardized. You need very small teams to design and test it. Manufacturing is mostly automated (or outsourced). This is still a niche job market compared to software, even if software is shedding and RF is adding. As a Ham, RF engineering seems interesting, but there's really not much for job prospects. Glassdoor shows 125k Software Engineer jobs and…
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…
So yeah, I would encourage any EE to look into it, because having an idea about RF can make any electronic design better (especially around things like EMC!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Electrical engineers don't really pull wires .... Electricians might be temporarily safe from AI but EEs are knowledge workers too.
"This is wrong, fix it" + recompile, can happen twenty times in ten minutes, but "we discovered the layout is wrong, fix it" is precluded by the cost and time of a new board spin.
AI + text (code) seems like a good match but (E)CAD seems a lot harder to interface AI with. If I'm wrong, I'd like to share that with the EEs on my team, though.
What this article misses is that all that hardware is pretty much standardized. You need very small teams to design and test it. Manufacturing is mostly automated (or outsourced). This is still a niche job market compared to software, even if software is shedding and RF is adding. As a Ham, RF engineering seems interesting, but there's really not much for job prospects. Glassdoor shows 125k Software Engineer jobs and…
That's only true if you're making something that's already been done.
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…
Since you have an EE background, I would recommend a few strategies (in any order, except 0 should be first if you have major deficiencies):
0) Brush up on some of your math if you need to. Linear algebra (just up to Eigenvector/Eigenvalue), vector calculus, differential equations. Mostly just understanding the concepts is OK, because the major derivations for RF engineering are relatively simple problems. That said, RF engineering is just one big love letter to linear algebra.
1) Read Pozar, as another commenter have suggested, but you don't need to cover-to-cover it. You absolutely must know some network theory, the basics of transmission lines (characteristic impedance, propagation, loaded driving point impedance), and simple matching techniques (basic RF design is about 75% just making sure power goes where you want it to). Beyond that you can pick and choose depending precisely on what you're doing.
2) Read older papers (1940s-1980s depending on topic) on whatever you're interested in. They're going to assume relatively little starting information. The only caveats are that notation has changed and that a lot of the design techniques, while still valid, were more useful when simulators weren't readily available (i.e. they assume a really strong mathematical background).
3) Stay low frequency as much as possible early on. 4) Tear apart anything you can get your hands on -- broken metrology equipment for one. Try and figure out why people are doing what they're doing. Just because a system's cheap doesn't mean they aren't using some cool tricks.
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…
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. It pays off to have multiple experts really look at every part of a design and think through it before shipping. Don't treat anything as trivial.
Unfortunately for us software types, somebody with an EE degree can go into software and then pivot back into RF engineering. I doubt that somebody with a CS degree could (as in, I think they'd be intellectually capable of it, but they'd never get hired).
i have done firmware development, pcb design and light ee work and basic rf and antenna design professionally with zero degrees. like anything else it’s a matter of getting your foot in the door first, then outperforming the academic nerds with zero experience
You're right, and Hubble Network ( https://hubble.com ) is proof. We make commodity Bluetooth LE chips talk to satellites. That required antenna design and link budget work no software abstraction would fix. Hubble does the deep RF work so that firmware engineers building IoT devices never have to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are far too many Asian electronic engineers for NA or EU based craftsmen to gain easy living. You have to make a viral product and find a way to satiate the demand, to find similar success to software & AI bros.
That's just not true. Do you think Bosch is a Chinese company or something?