Ode to Old RF Guys

                         Ode to Old RF Guys

I'm sure you know, we old RF guys have bad joints (high power RF burned all the stuff between our bone joints away). A common malady is our ears don't work (too many loud booms from power amplifiers on the bench blowing up, too many straight out of school college kids telling us we don't know what we're doing, and managers yelling at us for schedule slips as physics is hard to trick). We have arthritis in our hands from too many times grabbing the needle nose pliers to tune coils, using tweezers to wrangle parts we can't see anymore, and the countless times we've tightened the RF connector at the end of a cable. We suffer from numb fingers from inadvertently touching too many over-temperature RF parts as we tune them, and soldering iron burns as the days are long and we get sleepy. We possess bad fingernails from inadvertently touching live RF traces with 100 watts on them and blistering off the skin underneath. But we have big shoulders, share with others, and usually don't think we're hot stuff as the next RF project will whittle our egos down to size always remembering we learned all we know from other old folks when we were younger. Share that with your RF engineer husband, I'm sure he could add a few more (or you could)… Software is for sissies." - Anon

Posted  January 20, 2014