CHICAGO – The HetNet Forum welcomed more than 600 companies to Chicago this week for its HetNet Expo, and most of the companies exhibiting at the show were focused on distributed antenna systems. Several made time to talk with RCR Wireless News about skill sets they look for when hiring engineers to work on DAS projects.
“RF design experience is a must for us,” said CommScope’s Michael Shumate, business operations VP in the company’s DAS group. CommScope is a leader in DAS deployments, and is a top hirer of DAS RF engineers. “Good design engineers are hard to find,” said Shumate. “We always look for … someone who has been in the industry for a while or has that basic background.”
Those that don’t yet have the basic background may be able to pick up some training independently. Some hirers are interested in candidates who combine DAS software certification with a background that demonstrates flexibility or readiness to learn new skills.
“Advanced RF values diversity of experience in a big way,” said sales engineering manager John Bramfeld. “We believe our equipment deserves a high level of engineering and we like cultivating that internally. … The engineer that I work most frequently with has a physics degree and worked at Argonne National Laboratory on nothing related to RF, but he was interested in iBWave and got himself certified, and he’s been outstanding.”
IBwave Design is a software provider used by nearly 600 clients to automate in-building network design planning activities. IBWave is a Canadian company that has grown along with the DAS industry. The company says it offers iBWave certification through both online and classroom training programs.
“Being able to do the iBWave designs and being certified is a must these days in the industry,” said CommScope’s Shumate. There are three levels of iBWave training. The first is enterprise networking planning. The second is propagation, data collection and optimization. The third is MIMO, Wi-Fi, complex venues and capacity planning.
Engineers from a variety of disciplines are finding their way onto distributed antenna projects. Some companies hire slightly different skill sets for in-house design work versus field work with customers.
“A number of our engineers that work directly with our neutral host partners and with the carriers have education in RF engineering but they don’t often specialize in the area of radio frequency technology so we look for a lot of that, particularly in the systems engineers and people who work with the actual deployments,” said Todd Landry, corporate VP for product and market strategy at JMA Wireless.
“Our engineers stem from electrical engineers, software engineers as well as mechanical engineers because we do a lot of very intricate designs,” said Landry. “We’re well known for compression connector technology, which is created by some of the top mechanical engineers in our industry.”
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