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IEEE Foothill Students Report on Visits to Maury Microwave
| July 24, 2013 | Posted by COMauthor under CN, COMSOC, CS, EDCAS, EmpNet, MTT/APS |
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The Foothill Section completed many successful tours of the Maury Microwave Facility during the Spring, 2013
As a Follow-up to our IEEE Foothill Section MTT / APS chapter meeting on January 31, 2013, we conducted a series of tours of the Maury Microwave factory facility in Ontario, CA. Our speaker that evening, Rusty Myers, gave a comprehensive talk on role of Calibration Techniques for Microwave Devices. To illustrate how these calibrations are done in practice, he arranged for a number of IEEE Student Branch tours of the Maury Microwave facility near Ontario Airport in the spring months.
Our IEEE Students from four engineering schools in our area took this opportunity for a visit and demonstration of the varied calibration instrumentation in real-time practice. The students came from Cal Poly Pomona came on March 27; Harvey Mudd College on April 3; Mt San Antonio College on April 10; and University of California Riverside on May 1, 2013.
Uniformly, all the IEEE Foothill students found the tours interesting and informative. Many had to see the milling machinery in action to grasp what the sizes of the microwave waveguides and mating pieces for millimeter wavelengths really are. The sizes of the waveguides used in the calibration, as dictated by the frequency band of the devices under test, had to be manufactured to specified tolerances in the Maury facility. That Maury engineers can predict the electrical performance of the millimeter wave calibration device from the measured shapes and surfaces of the machined devices pointed out all the prior engineering testing that is required. All in all,the tours were a good introduction to microwave calibration for our IEEE Foothill Students.
Most of the IEEE students came away with a grasp of the “impedance matching concept”. Moreover, we did receive some useful post-tour written comments from the student visitors.
One made this observation: “I had no idea what to expect at the Maury Microwave tour, and did not understand the terms “Smith Chart”,”network analyzer”, “h-parameters” or “s-Parameters”. I would have benefited from a primer or short brochure explaining these terms. “
We in the IEEE Foothill Section are planning a repeat, with suggested revisions, of this Microwave Calibration talk and related Maury Microwave tours during the upcoming Fall 2013 term. More of our students are becoming interested in the RF and Microwave field. As many students have previously noted, all have a cell phone dependent upon a working RF and Microwave system — one that does not have many signal drop outs. Many will be looking to develop their knowledge base in RF and Microwaves with an eye for future employment opportunities.
It may also be, after Apple reported via the Wall Street Journal on July 21 that information on some of its 274,000 registered developers for APPs on its mobile devices had been “hacked”, that our IEEE Foothill Students may be looking into RF and Microwaves as better EE career paths.