answer: roughly half, since that's the USA proportion who have gotten on
the air with their own station, which usually involves system tradeoff
studies and system integration issues, if nothing else, antenna building
and location, and so on. Not the answer you expected? ;-)

I keep meaning to write an article for QST on A.R.S.E. - amateur radio
system engineers (grins), following up on Forest Mims III observation in
Nuts and VOlts that electronic hobbyists no longer work much at the
component level (thanks largely to microcontrollers and integrated chips
(PLAs...). Most of us work at subsystem level in projects (at least in
terms of decades past).

On the other hand, the amateur radio systems many of us have are far more
complex, with lots more interactions (e.g., software issues, antenna
interactions for multi-bands and modes, satellite orbit predictions, and
more modes and bands of operation than the 3 or 5 band AM/CW or SSB/CW
rigs of the 1950s and 1970s. We have five different types of antenna coax
connectors on our dual band ATV system, between two transmitters, beam
antennas, preamps, downconverters, and all the rest.

And yeah, I have EE and CSE graduate degrees as well as a systems
engineering grad degree; but the reason they pay systems engineers more on
average is that making things work together well (hardware, software..) is
often far harder than designing or building the components. Read
comp.risks digest to see something of what I mean ;-)

And fyi, practically all the designs now are done on computer (from boeing
777 down), and lots of graduating engineers have minimal exposure to
building anything either (usually just a simple senior design project,
maybe a few kits on the side). There is very little of the cut and try
approach often illustrated here ;-)

On the other hand, they may have designed microprocessor cores and tested
them in software, which would have been far beyond some of the heroic and
epic hardware designs of just 30 years ago (see my serial #186 example of
the world's first microcomputer (Intel 4004 from 1972) at
http://people.smu.edu/rmonagha/4004.html ).

grins bobm
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* Robert Monaghan POB 752182 Southern Methodist Univ. Dallas Tx 75275 *
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