I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did.

You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far far more than a laptop. Information is much more sparse so being around knowledgeable others is often critical.

The industry is packed with grey beards, I'm often the youngest guy by 20 years in customer meetings.

Maybe things will change now that we're in a period of uncertainty, but I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.

There was never a decline in RF engineering demand, it's actually going up massively. But not in the US, Canada, Sweden... all the work is in China.

It will actually be impossible to catch up with China on RF unless the US and Europe legislate for IP (not manufacturing!) to originate in the West. No Huawei 5G, no cheap Chinese SDN/ethernet, etc. Core switching and 5/6G edge. Remove patent protection for 5G designs.

I always wanted to get into RF design, but couldn't find it within the mega company I work for (we integrate more than we design at the component level). RF design has always been a bit of black magic, even as an EE. Other than some really great books from ARRL in the amateur radio arena, I haven't found too many good "as it really works in the working world" references. Can anyone point at any good books and/or sites that go into detail about this fascinating field?

Going into the RF field myself, I've been troubled with the license costs of tools like HFSS and CST. After a brief test of the open source tool OpenEMS I've landed firmly on the newer open source tool EMerge (https://github.com/FennisRobert/EMerge). It's a little rough around the edges still as it was released in the fall. But I've already gotten good results from it designing my own RF hardware.

Apart from that I wonder how much of the resurgence can be traced back to more active conflicts around the world? There is a booming Drone and EW development within the military sector which could be what drives it?

I don't know that I agree with the article's point about stagnation ("quiet, non-evolving field") as there have been plenty of new developments in the 2010s and 2020s, but speaking as someone who hires RF engineers of various sorts, the hiring market is definitely heating up. As the article points out, space seems to be the main driver by a huge margin, with Amazon especially as well as SpaceX hiring a ridiculous number of folks directly and then the second-order LEO military applications pushing a boom on that side as well. Apple has affected the hiring on the handset baseband side some too, but nowhere near as much as space.

This article also needs a huge (in the US) disclaimer on it as Europe, especially, has had a boom in automotive components and vehicle telemetry in recent years and obviously a lot of consumer devices and handset stuff comes out of China now.

Unfortunately for us software types, somebody with an EE degree can go into software and then pivot back into RF engineering. I doubt that somebody with a CS degree could (as in, I think they'd be intellectually capable of it, but they'd never get hired).

I took a bunch of RF / coms classes during my MSEE. Those were some of the hardest for me to learn - and we were few students. Never more than 10, but usually in the 3-5 range depending on how "general" the classes were, with microwave engineering being the biggest class.

Do undergrad EEs get work as RF engineers? Again, when I went to school, so many of the RF classes were mostly grad school classes, or at very minimum last year undergrad classes. I personally did not have any during undergrad. So many prereq courses.

Author here :) glad this sparked some discussion. A few folks raised the geographic scope and consumer RF side, which are fair things to flag. I tried to cover automotive, 5G, and IoT in the piece, though looking back at this, I could've framed the opening more clearly, as it was more a gut feeling specific to my US aerospace / defense experience rather than a universal claim. That context should've been clearer from the start. Still learning/new to writing more publicly so knowing where the framing didn't land is super helpful for me going forward

You're right, and Hubble Network (https://hubble.com) is proof. We make commodity Bluetooth LE chips talk to satellites. That required antenna design and link budget work no software abstraction would fix.

Hubble does the deep RF work so that firmware engineers building IoT devices never have to.

> 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?

This is my recent comments on the new RF System-on-Module (SoM) assemblies [1].

If you want to venture or pivot into RF, especially from software background this is the golden time that's made possible/feasible by software-defined radio (SDR) technology as mentioned in the OP article.

One very important thing that the article did not mention is the emerging and increasing popularity of physical AI [2]. RF can be the crucial enabler to to further enhance human limited sensing capabilities with EM based waveforms. A simple analogy is how the dog's powerful smelling capabilities is helping/enhancing human detection capability.

Rather than just training and inferencing on image based I/O, the physical AI now can feed on the much richer RF, mmWave, THz and LIDAR raw waveforms. The good news is that the latter processing of mmWave, THz and LIDAR, can be greatly enhanced by the former lower RF baseband (modulated information signals) that's not previously possible/feasible.

[1] Comments on "ADSY1100-Series: RF System-on-Module Assemblies":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47821336

[2] What is physical AI?

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/physical-ai

I've come full circle, and it is amazing how much has changed since I've last worked with anything in this field. Frequencies and a degree of precision and insight that you could have only dreamed of on a normal person's budget in the 80's are now easily attainable and combined with some knowledge of software there isn't a whole lot you can not do that you can think of, as long as it is physically possible and you have the time to spare to implement it. Still, it's hardware, and debugging is an order of magnitude harder than debugging software, so you have to prepare for that, as well as to make sure you get very close to being 100% right on your first try, respins in hardware are - unlike software - very expensive and can easily kill you. And in a way that's good, and it would be much better still if the software world was somehow forced to stop shipping halfbaked stuff.

RF seems to have been doing fine? Like you specifically mention telco, and I have been watching a steady stream of rf telco products and improvements released over just the last 15 years? You sort of skip straight to 5G ignoring everything up until that point.

Even as a dot point mentioning the whole WiGig -> IgniteNet thing? Is that not interesting to you?

>>> The underlying physics (electromagnetics, thermodynamics, materials science, manufacturing tolerances) don't reduce to algorithms. You have to build intuition for it, and that's not something you can shortcut.

Just wondering how an LLM replaces that job …

I’m not sure how the unit counts relate to the idea that vastly more EEs will be required. Sure there is some overhead in scaling manufacturing but I doubt it requires that many more EEs whether your satellite or automotive fleet is 10 units or 1000.

There is an author comment that is invisible if you don't have showdead on in the thread below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926755

RF is radio frequency and EE is Electronic Engineer ?

> RF was nowhere on my radar.

cue rimshot

It's also progress in components and compute that made insane things possible on a budget, that opened up new markets. Look at what this guy is doing https://hforsten.com/synthetic-aperture-radar-autofocus-and-...

But when will RF engineering pay 500k (common mid level SWE)?

Indeed, the dark arts of RF engineered components persist long after other technologies change.

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

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/

The demand for electronic warfare specialists is growing.

I agree broadly with the author but I think they miss the fact that American EE supply is not going to grow at e.g., 7% year over year. The infra for training new EEs, that is, the technical university, is losing the societial investment and public policy that made it possible.

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This person knows nothing about RF and is just another applications monkey. Without taking fields and waves you are at best a technician. Anyone who actually worked in defense knows that minicircuits is a notorious company that pays very poorly and has massive turnover. Many of the other defense/space RF subs are just the same. The author is just mangling all RF communications applications into one big ball. And of course the authors pathetic theory background means that RADAR is the only sensing application they "understand".

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.

I never understand why posts like this do not start with explaining what they are talking about. I am not familiar with the abbreviation RF and I'm not going on a research quest to guess which one the author could mean.