RF engineers are really the engineers of engineers, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I don’t think I know anyone in RF that I would describe as fully sane and neurotypical.
We’re the weird kids that built radios instead of playing outside, I guess.
Also, it’s the one subject with less women than even mech-eng in my experience (weirdly enough, I do know two female information theory professors), for whatever reason.
I went on a date with a girl who said she was going to school for communication.
We were at a bar and grill, so I misheard her and started deep diving into networks, fiber, PTP and OTA, my favorite switches and routers, why I hate and love Cisco, but why I prefer Brocade and Ruckus, was even starting to get into AM and FM when she finally stopped me:
not communications, communication. Like, you know, talking.
Oooooh. That’s cool.
And somehow I saved the date and we were together for a good five years.
Didn’t even get to satellites. She did really appreciate that she didn’t have to pay to have her macbook repaired, or any other IT shit.
talking
propaganda
What?
The common term for “Public Relations.”
I am not asking what your definition of propaganda is. I am saying I am missing your frame of reference.
She doesn’t do propaganda. We would have never, ever dated. She ended up working at a hospital.
So I guess raising awareness for women to check themselves and how to for breast cancer (literally what she did) is somehow now propaganda.
You don’t like boobs and human lives? Are you one of those anti-breast-checkers? Breast cancer denier?
Well, I am drinking the kool-aid, Alex Jones. /simply being facetious, not mocking you, so please take no offense.
So I do computers/networks/programming, and I have a big white board in my living room.
She was finishing her bachelors and I came home one day to find she wrote “I am so sick of talking about talking!”
I didn’t erase it. Just worked around it. And I would point at it anytime I had to repeat myself. I am obviously a charmer.
But we aren’t together now, actually, because she didn’t want children and I did. So it goes.
Do tell me your opinions on Cisco. My work is somewhat adjacent and sometimes there’s an overlap but I know very little about it.
e.g. VLAN trunking.
If you use Cisco anywhere in your infrastructure, then you kind of need to use it elsewhere.
Overpriced. Overrated. And I hate dealing with their licensing.
God, I agree so hard. And they rename shit rather than sticking to IEEE standards. And while GSM3 is free, the firmwares aren’t.
It is cheaper to buy a $100 48 port brocade off eBay than a $5000 24 port that then requires you to pay to learn how to use it.
Cisco is the network devil, as well as Fortigate, Juniper, and Sonicwall. Ubiquiti is almost getting to be as bad but in a different way: let’s make shit so user friendly that CEOs love it, but user unfriendly so that network guys are like, "dude, this should be fucking simple! I have to dig into all these menus and then find the field buried in a pretty format.
“Just give me the terminal. Oh, I can ssh in but I don’t have sudo. Nope, you need to use the convoluted web UI to so that.”
As someone who wants to get into networking and also doesn’t want to give Cisco money, what do you suggest I do. I currently have some of the comptia certs (net and sec). With my 2-3 years in IT (workjng with networking and servers), how can I improve myself to get another job?
Its hard right now. Fortinet is one of my favorites for hardware. Tailscale for SDN. Ruckus is underrated.
Edit: For a career move, do Tailscale.
Do you recommend fortinet nse certs?
Nice, I’ve actually been using tailscale in my homelab
Who _doesn’t_have shitty licensing?
I loved Cambium, buuuuut they just got fucked.
Just like so many amateur radio operators are afraid to speak on air
Most of ham is, sadly, either pre-arranged groups or contest stuff. I very rarely get people just having a chat.
The edgelord gatekeepers that will try and boot you off a repeater during snowstorm travel just so they can have their precious weekly net where nothing useful happens.
Many hams seem to be governance larpers instead of members of a community.
Huge turn-off.
Some repeaters are much worse than others. My local one in Europe is fine, mostly old folks with nothing to do at home, or old folks driving around in a car with a radio set to the repeater out of habit.
If there were more homers willing to coach new hams instead of telling them to get off the frequency, we would be less afraid of messing up and more willing to talk.
It’s a little scary on the repeater, you never know who’s listening…
You see, comms networks have nice, straightforward protocols for interaction. There’s defined handshakes, everyone’s clear on who the message is for and what’s the actual content versus just the packaging (headers, etc.).
Human to human communication? Now that’s a complicated mess. Can’t always tell what the actual message is, there’s multiple carrier types (body language, voice, etc.) and it’s really bad at handling packets from multiple senders over short periods!
Real life handshakes are a mess too. It’s like a game of rock-paper-scissors.
Is it a high handshake or a low? Ah it’s a fist bump. Oh no wait, it is a low handshake! Grabs the fist
Some don’t have handshakes. Radio broadcasting just infodumps on everyone, which is also what some neurodivergent people wish they could do
“Now I can tell everyone about the British Rail Class 55 Deltic… Wait… you want to what? … Top 40 what? Pop… Music? Noooooooo!”
Or sports…
Other person: “Team A is playing against Team B! It’s the first time in X years that they’ve been in the grand finals!” Me: who? what game is this?
(Australia is obsessed with football and cricket, to the extent where you can’t help but pick up a few names just because they’re talked about so much.)
Crickets you say, I am sure we could get someone to ramble about bugs for hours.
Well duh!
Most of the RF is invisible to people.I wish I could get beamed off this shit hole world into space at the speed of light.
Unsung heroes
