The Quiet Resurgence of RF Engineering

I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field. The advice I heard early on, and that I watched a lot of other people follow, was to go into software. Machine learning, cloud infrastructure, web development. That's where the growth was, that's where the money was, and honestly, that's where most new graduates went (myself included at the time). I studied Information Systems in college, not electrical engineering. RF was nowhere on my radar. But aerospace has a way of pulling you into hardware whether you planned on it or not. I started my career at NASA, building telemetry platforms, ETL pipelines, and spacecraft visualization tools. Pure software work. Then I moved to a private aerospace company. Much smaller than NASA (approx 130 employees at the time I joined), and it required me to wear a ton of hats to work on ground systems. That's where…