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The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

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Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#91

Post by gbgarbeb »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #62
rhave wrote: post #4

Going into the RF field myself, I've been troubled with the license costs of tools like HFSS and CST. After a brief test of the open source tool OpenEMS I've landed firmly on the newer open source tool EMerge ( https://github.com/FennisRobert/EMerge ). It's a little rough around the edges still as it was released in the fall. But I've already gotten good results from it designing my own RF hardware. Apart from that I…

not to mention the price of a remotely usable vector network analyzer will make any software look affordable

A $50 TinyVNA is too expensive? Please.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#92

Post by atollk »

solomonb wrote: post #34
atollk wrote: post #33

I never understand why posts like this do not start with explaining what they are talking about. I am not familiar with the abbreviation RF and I'm not going on a research quest to guess which one the author could mean.

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=what+is+rf+engineering%3F

Thanks. The early 2000s wants their joke back. And just like it was back then, it's still not funny, just rude.

My criticism still stands. If I know what I am searching for, it's easy to find. But often enough have I seen authors use terms which can have multiple meanings and I would need to look at their definitions in parallel of the context of the article, just to understand what it's even about. No thanks, I'll just pick the next HN post instead.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#93

Post by fc417fc802 »

mikestorrent wrote: post #56
CamperBob2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of 'harmful materials and chemicals' are we talking about?

I used to work at a place that had a factory that made cryogenically-freezable circuit boards. I only had to visit from time to time... It was a crazy 1980s legacy place with ancient machines and weird vats of weird smelling chemicals all over the place for etching and finishing. No idea whether they were harmful or not, nobody seemed to need any PPE though....

If this was the US (and depending on how long ago) there is a federal requirement to have all the relevant MSDS printed out in binders on a shelf somewhere accessible to the rank and file. Those list PPE requirements and safe exposure limits among other things. Not that anyone ever bothers to read them.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#94

Post by bsder »

uejfiweun wrote: post #13
TimorousBestie wrote: post #2

I agree broadly with the author but I think they miss the fact that American EE supply is not going to grow at e.g., 7% year over year. The infra for training new EEs, that is, the technical university, is losing the societial investment and public policy that made it possible.

Do you really think that the university is going to be the bottleneck? I have to imagine that sometime in the next decade, there's going to be some big reorganization to reflect the fact that you can now learn just as well OUTSIDE of a university context. Credentials are going to become less important, standardized testing and examination far more.

I have never seen an electrical engineer who managed to skip the university context let alone an RF electrical engineer. Zero. None.

There is a reason why so many people from engineering can switch to software while the converse almost never occurs.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#96

Post by sleepycat801 »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #28
WarmWash wrote: post #10

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…

> " ...stuck with hardware out of passion... " At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.

I could say the same, ee graduate who majored in telecom/RF but there was no work in it (or rather nobody wanted to hire a graduate). I did get hired into power electronics, but the work they needed was in software. Since then it has been redundancies every few years, through automotive application development, some audio visual, and even dev-ops.

The AI trend and yet another redundancy foreced me to reckon with what I hate about software, which is a tech ethos of "move fast and break things" that runs contrary to "measure twice, cut once". AI also transforms my strengths into executive functioning tasks, which are a mental bottleneck.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#97

Post by protocolture »

RF seems to have been doing fine? Like you specifically mention telco, and I have been watching a steady stream of rf telco products and improvements released over just the last 15 years? You sort of skip straight to 5G ignoring everything up until that point.

Even as a dot point mentioning the whole WiGig -> IgniteNet thing? Is that not interesting to you?

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#99

Post by protocolture »

loodish wrote: post #42
cactacea wrote: post #3

> I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field. Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working…

> Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - Lots of RF devices doesn't actually mean much RF engineering. If you want 5G connectivity almost everyone buys an integrated module. Chip, antenna, and certifications included. No serious RF engineering required, no RF engineer in the building. Those modules designers would be p…

Theres multiple duelling companies just in the class license antenna space. Like not even emitters, just designing compatible antennas for other peoples telco products.

Theres the whole thing where all the wigig chips that dell binned got upcycled into a companies flagship rf product.

Cambium v Ubiquiti has been an ongoing contest. Add Mikrotik in for good measure.

RF Elements is always trying to sell me something new.

Aviat has bought out NEC's famous flagship RF line, at least in terms of US distribution.

Theres enough happening.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#100

Post by solomonb »

atollk wrote: post #92
solomonb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=what+is+rf+engineering%3F

Thanks. The early 2000s wants their joke back. And just like it was back then, it's still not funny, just rude. My criticism still stands. If I know what I am searching for, it's easy to find. But often enough have I seen authors use terms which can have multiple meanings and I would need to look at their definitions in parallel of the context of the article, just to understand what it's even about. No thanks, I'll j…

You literally just have to search RF Engineering and the very first results will explain the term for you.
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