“Dean can go to the lab.” I was walking out of my first job after graduating college, likely on my way to dinner or to watch a game somewhere. The office area where the engineering group sat at Two Technologies in Horsham, PA, had a large round table where we would look at drawings, talk about design, shoot the breeze, and talk about life. A lot of decisions were made at that table, and that’s where I was asked to be the person who traveled with our products to an EMC compliance laboratory, and it altered my career path and took me in a direction I never predicted.
As the saying goes, when opportunity knocks, one should answer. Not knowing anything about what I was getting into, it sounded interesting and exciting and a way to escape the mundane cubicle life and go somewhere else.
When you’re in your early to mid-twenties, no kids, and barely negotiating the responsibilities of life, you have the energy after work to go out, be social, and enjoy the local nightlife. You’re also able to accept travel on a whim.
So, after accidentally walking into that meeting around the roundtable just outside of my boss’s office, I became the de facto laboratory person, traveling to local metropolises like rural Pennsylvania and later down to Gaithersburg, Maryland. I didn’t know what I was looking at, other than squiggly lines on a screen with a technician telling me that it was simply a “pre-scan” and that the data they were taking really didn’t mean much.
A colleague, Philip Lanese, showed me the ropes and what to look for, helping me understand compliance and how it affected our sales and customers. He’d been involved in the industry for a long time, working with the space program, defense, and private industry. There are times even today that I wish I could reach out to him, thank him for helping guide me down the path that eventually became my career. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2017.
I began traveling to Phil’s house in Holtwood, PA, to learn how to evaluate issues when we had failures in the lab, learning how to make changes and what affected circuits and what didn’t. To describe what Phil was like, he had purchased his land in Holtwood, near Lancaster, based on an RF study he performed himself to know it was quiet enough to do some of his HAM radio work without major RF interference. He had a makeshift EMC laboratory in his house, with spectrum analyzers and horn antennas and future plans to develop an open area test site. We’d take measurements and email them to the VP of engineering, make suggestions and fixes, and then take the test samples back to the lab. This went on for about a year before the local laboratory closed, and I headed to Gaithersburg to meet Steve Koster and Mike Violette at Washington Laboratories. Steve helped guide me through the process of a test program, showing me different test methods and how they applied different limits. I was finally comfortable with all of it and could speak mostly intelligently. Mostly.
Just as I was getting settled as the ‘laboratory guy,’ the company had a sizable reduction in force, and I was laid off. Luckily, though, I didn’t have to leave my knowledge behind. After working in NJ for about 18 months or so after I was let go from 2T, I was offered a job at Retlif Testing Laboratories as a test procedure writer. I wrote procedures for military equipment that would be tested. I wrote procedures for equipment used by the US Navy, Army, and Air Force, learning how it all worked and how it would be tested. Mostly working with MIL-STD-461 and RTCA/DO-160 test procedures, I gained the trust of military and aviation representatives upon our procedure submittals.
After writing procedures exclusively for about a year, I started applying my developing skills in the lab, managing test programs and day-to-day testing and schedules, and working with others to ensure the lab ran as smoothly as possible on a day-to-day basis. On any given day, I would be working with MIL-STD-461, RTCA/DO-160, FCC, and European CE testing, all while reviewing reports, looking at test data, and even sometimes testing. It was a busy place. I still wrote test procedures and dipped my hands in product safety and ballast water systems testing for large ships.
After working there for just shy of 9 years, I decided to move on to become an Applications Engineer at Amplifier Research. There I taught others about EMC testing, application of requirements, and even how to set up test laboratories from scratch. We also designed and built test systems, installing them all over the world and teaching others how to be test engineers rather than button-pushers. I worked with Tesla, Apple, Agilent, Honeywell, Amazon, and others. I traveled all over the country and the world, from coast to coast and to Poland, Germany, Korea, Finland, and a few other places.
Now, I work in the defense sector, doing work that is very similar to what I’ve been doing for the past 15 years but on different products.
So, this career of mine started by accident. Sure, I had a college education and two degrees as proof, but walking past that meeting on my way out the door sent me on a vector that I barely knew existed.
Looking back on it now, I do that pretty often when I walk into my office or see coworkers from past jobs; I look at how far EMC has taken me, and I wonder how much further it will take me.
So, when opportunity presents itself, I hope you recognize it like I did. I consider myself lucky to notice it when I did. I’d like to dedicate this piece to Philip Lanese, because, without him, I probably wouldn’t have developed the skills to fix the issues we saw. I’d still take the products to the lab, but I would have shrugged my shoulders a lot more without his guidance.
Thanks, Phil.
