At Hughes Aircraft, I worked on device engineering for communication satellites, specifically in the filters and multiplexers lab. I helped to design and develop a series of half-height waveguide couplers at the C-band microwave frequency. I also assembled, tuned, and tested C-band telemetry filters, bandpass filters, and output multiplexers. The devices I worked on were for the Brasilsat, Solidaridad, and Panamsat programs. The devices were gold or silver plated for conductivity reasons.
As a summer engineering intern at Delphi, I worked with a small team trying to reduce the impact of radio frequency electromagnetic emissions produced by a motor-controller assembly within a completely electronic steering system. (It was assumed that car owners would not want to hear a whirring sound in the radio every time they turned the steering wheel.) This required measuring emissions and then testing proposed electromagnetic compatibility solutions. A highlight of the internship was a trip to the General Motors proving grounds to use one of their anechoic chambers.
In this summer position during grad school, I assisted staff engineers in the R&D lab on projects involving large uninterruptible power systems such as a cabinet of batteries that would switch immediately to power a hospital floor in case of a power outage.
The aim of the project was to integrate measurement data from lasers to quickly form computer models of the size, shape, and position of a target object. My contribution was testing software that would be used to interface with the lasers. For that, I learned about image processing using the “C” programming language.