about electronics

The ones that involve less insertion delay are more interesting.

Most of them want the timing ramp to start a few nanoseconds before they know they need to start it. Thiotimoline would solve that problem, if it existed.

But not in others.

Which inserts a delay.

Like the emitter-coupled monostable, it isn't original.

Pity about the instant-start timing oscillator.

About 3 nanoseconds. If the triggered oscillator is accurate and low-jitter on its own, we can observe it and phase lock it at leisure. No rush.

The HP 5359A time synthesizer used a triggered delay-line oscillator and used a slow complex heterodyne system to phase-lock it to an OCXO. Similar idea. But they didn't have access to fast ADCs and DACs like we do now.

My favorite triggered oscillator uses a coaxial ceramic resonator, but that has lots of real-world problems.

OK, you design a DDG and show me how.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

If you need to adjust the frequency, there's an accumulating phase error until you have got the frequency right. You can't get the frequency right in 3 nanoseconds.

One designs a digital delay generator for a particular customer - if you are lucky, a group of customers. I haven't got the customers for whom I'd generate the system design. The one I did build was for the Cambridge Instruments stroboscopic electron microscope.

It turned out to have elements in common with a two stage high precision mass spectrometer which I got involved with as stop gap job after the stroboscopic electron microscope job went sour. The system design for that was pretty horrible, and the customers apparently weren't open to redesigning their experiments to make the measurements easier.

No, it isn't. Do you know what Coriolis is?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

An interesting ratio. Maybe screens to bench power supplies would be a better measure of academic analog electronics rigor as oscopes in an educational setting might be the USB type that plugs into a computer.

There's far less demand for electrical engineers. Too much is "slap together" from prefabbed modules -- designed by a relative few people feeding multiple customer products. And, their efforts in typical product designs are relatively small (man-hours).

By contrast, the software/firmware in YOUR product is almost certainly not the same as in some other product (even if you leverage something like a Linux kernel).

Electrical Engineer salaries: 64,511 - 137,087 [$87,988] Software Engineer: 75,449 - 209,993 [132,417]

(composite of a variety of market surveys)

There is downward pressure on pay for entry/early career EE/SEs and considerable upward pressure on more experienced.

Sure. It might take 10 usec or so to observe and lock. If the LC is very good, it doesn't drift much meanwhile.

I think the HP took much longer to close the loop.

How did that work?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Around here, the average EE salary is $151K.

The biggies, google and Apple, pay something like $300K. They bid against one another.

What I meet is a lot of unemployed CE/EE people, coders, who don't make the cut for the biggies.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

We worked out when the start pulse had come in w.r.t. the local oscillator to about about 5psec (which took about 20nsec) and generated an output from the appropriate output from the 800MHz edge one cycle before the right time and generated a fine delay (to about 5psec).

The first try at the 800MHz oscillator didn't work and it's quick and dirty replacement had 60osec of jitter. We could have done better if we'd had to but our sampling pulse was 500psec wide and the 10pec was just the boss indulging in specmanship, and we had more urgent problems to deal with.

Or navigating "narco subs" across the Pacific to supply the Australian cocaine market.

The Coriolis effect is a means to take into account the fact of the Earth's surface spinning at 1,000 MPH beneath the atmospheric trajectory of the object of interest. This causes a deflection in the ground track similar to what can be expected from an externally applied force, which in fact does not exist. The existence makes no difference to people who are primarily interested in computing trajectories that agree with reality. The external pseudo-/ fictional- force concept works just as well for that purpose.

I wish we could hire good EEs for $137K.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

And is the energy required to accelerate a cubic meter of air to that 1000 mph larger or smaller than the heat required to warm it up by however much the article says it would be?

There are situations where convective effects dominate—most of the interior of the Sun for instance, with convective velocities on the order of 100km/s iirc —but Earth’s atmosphere is not one of them.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It might be easier if you didn't interview them yourself.

The tangential 1000 MPH is initial velocity of the air because it originates in the rotating reference frame. No acceleration needed.

Good point. My company would hire more cheap duds.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

They might also get to hire people that your antics could have put off. Asking potential hires really simple questions about electronics might save you from hiring a cheap dud, but it might put off somebody who might think that you hadn't bothered to read their CV (or worse, might think that you had not been able to understand it).

Job interviews are a two way street. The interviewee gets an insight into the people they might end up having to work with.

That would get you about 3 engineers in the UK (ignoring the overheads).

Yikes. Do any EEs in the UK work for $45K? I pay student interns more than that.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics