Posted by merlinq 2 days ago
Mostly, expensive tools became more accessible like TinySA, LiteVNA64 and NanoVNA.
For the amateur Ham hobby, it has been a bit of a golden age with <$50 rtl-sdr SDR kits. =3
It's more business model than skillset, because RF engineering is, in many ways, so much more technically challenging.
People who care about pay should mostly be thinking about how their potential employers make money. Do they have fat variable margins? Is there volume? Do I have the opportunity to impact those margins in some way? If you do, there's a good chance you can make good money, regardless of the actual technical challenge at hand.
For a lot of RF engineering, the answers are generally no, at least enough such that the general market isn't getting set at a high clearing rate.
These are not topics you will just figure out on your own or "on the job".
The other aspect is the professional engineering credentials. At least in Canada Engineering is a protected title. of which the easiest way to get your P.Eng is getting a degree through an accredited engineering program.
There is a reason why so many people from engineering can switch to software while the converse almost never occurs.
Yes. I think American society will struggle to produce enough competent electrical engineers outside of the university system.
> 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
In my experience, very few people like learning the math needed to be competent at RF. It’s hard and exhausting and without a human connection most people are going to bounce. This isn’t like software where if you get it 80% right something still occurs.
I’ve worked with homeschoolers too, and unless they’re the small fraction of people for whom math comes naturally, they’re not going to study it on their own. But that’s exactly the audience one has to reach to grow the EE supply.
Read this https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/where-are-they-n... and tell me how well this next big surge is going to work out any differnt.
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.