Showing posts with label rf design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rf design. Show all posts

25 Jun 2022

RF engineer shortage - NOT amateur radio

What the situation is like in other countries I do not know, but in the UK it is acute. There are far fewer RF designers than there once were. When I started in RF design, most were radio amateurs with a total fascination for RF. 

In my professional life, I saw many CVs from aspiring RF engineers. Most were hopeless! Graduates that knew really very very little. At 73 years I have been offered 2 jobs this year already! They must be very desperate!

Personally, I feel that many have lost the "magic" of RF. This is where amateur radio "self training" could help. We need more good, intrinsically motivated RF designers in the UK. We must do everything in our power to encourage RF design in the future.

30 Nov 2011

RF skill levels

In my professional life I interviewed many graduates aspiring to become RF engineers. Very few, in recent years, had what I would call "the knowledge". By this I mean a "gut instinct" for RF that does not come from an academic course, important though this aspect is.  Rather, this "jizz" comes by living and breathing RF through building RF things yourself, however simple. A great many 2:1 graduates in communications electronics knew almost nothing about RF, had never touched a soldering iron ever and were rejected. In all honesty I believe I could sense who would make a good RF engineer within 2 minutes of the interviews starting.

Today I received a request from a Spanish amateur who professed (more or less), "I`ve a problem. I know nothing about electronics and would be unable to build the SAQ converter on your website." He then offered to pay me to build and ship the converter to him. Surely, a radio amateur in ANY country should have learnt basic RF skills as part of his training in preparation for his licence? At the most basic level the understanding may not be deep, but how can a radio amateur really not know how to put together a basic circuit?

In the UK we have a growing, and very serious, issue with poorly educated science and engineering graduates who are simply not coming out of universities with the skills needed to start work in industry. One answer was the sandwich course in which young A-level students were accepted on a company training scheme that married "on the job" skills training with educational training, usually to HND or degree level. People spotted young, with real RF "jizz" (easily judged in interviews) usually went on to become the best engineers we had.