Thanks for stopping by and visiting my blog!  From the time I was in high school I knew I wanted to be an electrical engineer, and in fact, my very first job afteme (2)r being graduated from college was my dream job — VLF (very low frequency) antenna and communication systems engineer for the U.S. Navy!  VLF radio had fascinated me (and continues to do so to this day) throughout high school because of the incredible amount of power used by transmitters designed to communicate with submerged submarines (up to 2 million watts), and the enormity of the antenna structures — dozens of towers nearly 1000 feet tall supporting huge top-loading capacity hats.  I spent the first ten years of my engineering career in this work, traveling around the world and learning lots about very high power radio transmitters.

Over the years, my interests and activities in engineering have expanded greatly, and I now concentrate in product development engineering.  I really enjoy working with clients that have interesting new product ideas and are looking to implement them.  I enjoy not only the electronic design aspects of this work, but also the entire process of defining the overall needs of the product, identifying what the end-user expects the product to do, and how to translate that into actual engineering requirements.  Seeing a new idea move from a drawing on the back of a napkin to a working device ready to be produced in volume is incredibly fulfilling work for me.  I am always looking to meet individuals that have interesting ideas and want to bring them to the marketplace.

I’m also very interested in engineering education and keeping the “engineering basics” alive — the analytical ability of a working engineer is extremely important since it acts as a check on the overwhelming tendency to simply throw engineering problems at a computer.  Strong analytical ability is crucial to determining the “reasonableness” of the answers that computers provide — computers are quite capable of providing utterly incorrect answers to 12 decimal places.  As you’ll see in the blog, I offer lots of examples of things that are pretty basic to engineering design, but are extremely important nonetheless, to good engineering practice, and offer an opportunity for the reader to spend time thinking about how to solve problems using a pencil and paper, rather than a computer.  Never forget — the United States landed a man on the moon using a bunch of slide rules!

Enjoy!

David Fern