alt Hacker News> 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 on building weapons (i.e. defense) and being in the US?
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3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x predate their 8 years in aerospace. I worked on some of those 25 years ago. If you're not an EE, maybe you also didn't consider the lead time of working on HW to its adoption.
> 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 purchasing their chip from one of a few companies, like Qualcomm or MediaTek. Even then most of the work isn't RF engineering, it's stitching together a product and grinding through the certifications.
Much of the innovation is done away from the consumer space where certifications are less constraining.
Bit older than 8 years but even cramming a working GPS reciever into a phone was a huge, nontrivial achievement.
Even in defense, the advancements being made in fields like radar are incredible.
Also ignoring the massive new market that has been automotive radars which, as a market, have totally eclipsed weapons
Isn't the issue that this kind of RF is a lot like designing CPUs? There aren't many economically viable products that don't just use a COTS highly integrated circuit, so there aren't that many full on design jobs to go along with all the usage.
The product work is higher level system packaging, such as antennas and application-level manipulation of the whole RF block. But since so much is digital now, that is more software/computer architecture work rather than RF. The COTS RF circuit itself may have standardized serial or even packet interfaces to the rest of the product.