rfdave

WTOP, which is the All News/Traffic station is filled with ads from contractors during the Drive time. Of course, I last listened to them a year ago, but I suspect that hasn't changed. Listen to them anytime between 7am and 9am EST.

Or a Greek Diner in New Jersey?

Sounds like a fun filled hobby. How many people are interested in actually spending 30 to 40 hours spooling up to understand what they're getting, and 5 to 10 hours a month tracking it? I'm sure there's a population, but I'd rather spend another $20/month and do something fun with my time.

That's awesome. Now I have to buy all new appliances, with poorly implemented WiFi stacks, trash all my older, fully functional appliances (Oh, how environmentally friendly will that be?) to let my local power company save me $20/month. Sounds like a fantastic deal.

"The Complete Venus Equilateral" will scratch that itch.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Venus-Equilateral-George-Smi...

Somewhat related, http://server-sky.com/ proposes putting servers in orbit. Would make a nice adjutant to the mega constellation projects going on

It is, in fact, an emulator running the original microcode. Yes, Synthetic programming and all (Multiple Hundreds) of plug in modules are available, including new ones written today -see http://www.hp41.org/LibView.cfm?Command=Recent for examples.

Are you familiar with www.hpmuseum.org? Collectors and users of HP calculators hang out there. Hp41.org is great for the HP41

Option 1 - Plant trees that have been growing for millennia, with skills that are wide spread across all of humanity Option 2 - Invent technology that is currently unknown, scale it to a world wide scale, facing unknown challenges and problems with technology that is today completely unknown.

Hmmmmm

Nice. Which protocol are you using? How is equipment availability?

And for some reason the fact that the mice that were subjected to the cell phone signals lived longer is ignored by everyone.

You're trying for a huge breadth of material, stuff that is covered in multiple specialities in electrical engineering. Multivariable calculus is really the entry point for engineering level antenna design.

Balanis is the book I used in my antennas class, https://www.amazon.com/Antenna-Theory-Analysis-Constantine-B... but you'll need multivariable calculus to get through it.

They've also picked up the Ex-Motorola RFIC team in Phoenix. Integrating those two teams 9 time zones away I'm sure went poorly. I worked with both of those teams, and they're both sharp. I'm sure the integration was tough, and obviously went poorly.

That paper is out on the internet. I found a copy here https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6974...

it's a good read on outsourcing, profits and management.

You also want to be able to version data sheets to see where errata creeps in.

The significant spike at DC is an inherent issue with Direct conversion receivers, driven by circuit level DC offsets and IP2 contributions. Offset tuning works, but you're stuck with sucky image rejection (30 to 40 dB at best)

I also volunteered in my area to work the polls. Very rewarding work watching democracy take place. Please consider volunteering for the 2020 elections!

Not really. You'd be surprised how easy a LEO link budget is, the free space path loss isn't much more than a cell phone link.

I'm an experienced HW guy pondering this, My wife and I have kids out of college, so I'd be coming at this from the other end of the family pipeline.

Electronic Warfare is the general term for that. The Association of Old Crows https://www.crows.org/ is the relevant professional society, along with IEEE

Link to CELab post on Mil Std 810 - Gunfire shock.https://celab.com/en/laboratory/environmental-tests/mil-std-...

The application portion has a nice explanation on the effects of gun fire on systems. Keep in mind that "gunfire" covers everything from a 9mm handgun to a 30mm Gatling gun.

Switch mode power supplies are small, but the batteries to power them are not. NSA certified crypto modules aren't in an ARM chip the size of your thumbnail.

holding a pencil in one hand that has a tip at 650F isn't completely safe either.

Looks sketchy in what way?

The digital hardware to handle the output of a 4 GSPS ADC is beefy as hell. This part has integrated DDC's if you're happy with downsampling, but if you want full nyquist data coming out of this, you need to handle 6 Gbyte/Sec.

But there are many situations what you get yourself into that seem like a good idea at the time. It's impossible to make predictions about future events. The IBM employees getting laid off here are not responsible for the corporate decisions to outsource their jobs, and don't deserve the blame.

When you move into a New (New Lease/New Construction) building for the organization. Two for Two so far in my career.

Earlier in my career, I have been asked to design circuits in interviews. Phone screens have also included in depth discussions of component tradeoffs for various circuits. My most recent interview, after 20+ years of experience, wasn't very technical at all, mostly focusing on team fit and personalities. The whole discussion here of software engineers with 20+ years of experience having to code up fairly simple things on a white board is very strange to me, and fairly far outside my experience.

Yeah, but if your factory is down a flight of stairs, and you have daily face to face meetings with your Manufacturing engineers, who get involved with the product at the first meeting, it's a whole lot easier.

Certainly start with an Arduino if you want to turn it into a commercial product. If you can't get it to work with an Arduino, then a Beaglebone is probably the next step up. Stay away from Raspberry Pi, as getting the Broadcom SOC is not for the new player. Once things are working at the breadboard level, look at implementing it in a single board, eliminating all the redundancy in the schematic. While you're getting it working on a single board, work with an industrial designer to come up with a housing if you want something nice looking. Then, it's time to work on building up a batch. There are quite a few Contract Manufacturers in the US who would be happy to build your boards for you, and I'd recommend staying in the US to start with.

Think about testing in there, how are you going to test the 100 or 200 units you've build, and how are you going to handle the broken ones what people have.

I'm sure I'll think of more things later.