Anritsu - some of the best test equipment I ever used. I can’t remember the model number but I used a communication system tester when I worked for Ericsson for testing mobil handsets (we call them cell phones these days
). I remember writing a bunch of VB scripts to create automated test cases using that device. It was very cool back in those days.
I was the Mechanical Design Supervisor in the Microwave Components Lab when they were developing the 360 Vector Network Analyzer.
Mostly that gave me a chance to watch one of the Senior Microwave Engineers, Bill Oldfield, be a one man army.
Definitely the most skilled engineer I have worked with.
In one case, he asked the Manufacturing Engineering manager to make the saw cuts that create the 4 fingers of a K connector, their 0.5 to 46 GHz coax connector.
The manager said, it was not manufactureable.
So Bill went into his personal machine shop, fired up his 30,000 rpm slitting saw, and made 4 cuts and 8 fingers on a tube of the same ID and OD.
Way harder than making 2 cuts, because the fingers will just fly off and embed themselves in the ceiling.
He put the part with 8 fingers on the manager’s desk and pretty much said nothing.
I don’t know what the manager was thinking, he was hired to manage the staff that programmed the CNC machines and designed the tooling, 1/2 of it to build stuff that Bill himself designed.
Watching Bill teach machining to this experienced machinist-turned-manager was pretty interesting.
Bill did almost exactly the same thing to Julius Botka, who was kind of Bill’s counterpart at HP/Agilent, the most senior microwave guy.
There was an IEEE/MTTS conference where both Julius and Bill presented papers.
Botka presented a paper where he said that an SMA compatible connector that goes to millimeter wave frequencies, is impossible. Then he described their work on a non-SMA compatible HP proprietary millimeter wave connector.
Bill had the next paper, and presented the millimeter wave SMA compatible K connector. HP’s work was interesting but Bill pretty much shredded what Mr. Botka had to say about SMA compatibility being un-attainable.
Basically, HP went with the easier design. They probably sold a lot.