Brian B. Email & Phone Number

Boise, Idaho, United States

Ericsson bought Cradlepoint over 3 years ago (late 2020) and has finalized the transition

Boise, Idaho Area

This company designs high-performance cellular (3G-LTE-5G) + WiFi + GPS + Bluetooth routers for a wide range of commercial and public safety networking applications. My primary function is to serve as principal RF engineer for all things RF in a really good and very busy hardware development team. My responsibilities include antenna selection and performance optimization, radiated self-interference mitigation, RF connection issues, RF certification troubleshooting, and evaluation of radio coexistence for small housings with lots of antennas and multiple sensitive radios currently covering 600 MHz - 40 GHz.

Ongoing sideline work on a wide variety of electronics projects that interest me and people ask me to do.* Design experience has included: a UWB microwave open-waveguide antenna for a through-wall imaging radar; PCB-trace antenna with Class E RF tuning and harmonic filtering for small 420 MHz tracking transceiver device; helping to diagnose issues with a 900 MHz animal tracking system; several small PIC and Motorola microcontroller projects; a remote controlled motorized shade system (power-line carrier controlled); design of a multiple channel audio console with intelligent AGC amplifiers; a long-life battery powered door-monitor alarm; electroluminescent address display with solar-powered battery charger; and a miniaturized stun gun in flashlight housing intended for law enforcement use.

From Boise, Idaho - Headquarters In Jacksonville, Florida

R&D engineering design of high-performance satellite receiver front-end systems. * Designed and prototyped two generations of high-gain LNA for high-volume, commercial GPS active-antennas for high-performance commercial GPS systems. The LNA included very low noise (< 2 dB noise figure), dual-frequency bands (L1 and L2), high gain (50 dB), and switchable ceramic filtering (via magnetic reed switch and power-supply voltage-sense switching).* Designed custom low-noise block-downconverter (LNB) to translate S-Band satellite signals to L-Band. This system combined two antennas into an LNA with 1 dB noise figure, 50 dB overall conversion gain, and an embedded microprocessor to control the downconversion portion of the circuitry.* Designed active 4-way receive splitter with 4 Watt Tx/Rx antenna switch and about 11 dB gain per Rx port for 450 MHz system. The design fit into a small IP67 box smaller than a 3 inch cube and included Rx SAW filtering and active RF power limiting in the receive path to avoid overloading the transceiver. * Designed all PCB layouts for these products.

Senior R&D engineering position designing low-cost spectrum analyzers and related products. The products primarily cover international unlicensed ISM and ZigBee radio bands. These spectrum analyzers out-perform traditional lab spectrum analyzers for noise-floor sensitivity, and offer about 1 dB amplitude accuracy with about 30 KHz frequency accuracy for a fraction of the cost of traditional spectrum analyzers.* Designed an embedded processor-based dual-band spectrum analyzer covering the 2.4 GHz and 5 - 6 GHz bands that fits into a small USB dongle housing. Detection of the 5 - 6 GHz band was achieved through downconversion to 900 MHz and stepping through the 5 - 6 GHz spectrum in incremental ~100 MHz sections.* Designed a custom 900 - 970 MHz Japanese band version including the firmware system (USB HID device programmed in C).* Designed an ultra-small 2.4 GHz version containing a custom PCB squiggle antenna.* Designed a dual stacked-patch antenna array to provide a 2.45 GHz directional antenna accessory product.* Designed and built a small RF anechoic chamber suitable for antenna pattern measurements for small antennas.* Designed all PCB layouts for these products.

Senior R&D engineering position focusing primarily on low-power (1 mW peak) object detection radar systems using a direct RF-to-baseband downconversion technology. These 5.8 GHz commercial-vehicle radar designs are extremely robust, inexpensive, and capable of detecting both static and moving targets with range up to 100 feet depending upon the antenna used. * Designed a version of these radars utilizing a switched-beam antenna pattern consisting of switched, series-fed patch antennas to provide wide close-in detection and narrower far-range detection to approximate an overall rectangular detection zone. This version included digital tuning of the carrier center frequency, very low-cost, high-isolation pattern switching, and near ideal RF-to-IF voltage conversion. * Primary inventor of patent-pending technique to allow ranging of close-in targets with radar echoes falling within the transmitted pulse duration period when a pulsed radar is usually unable to detect due to transmitter power saturation. Wrote first draft of this patent.* Designed the RF portion of an ultra-wideband version operating in the 5.925 – 7.25 GHz frequency band. * Designed the entire 2nd generation 5.8 GHz radar family including all RF, analog and digital processing portions as well as proof-of-concept firmware. This version of the Preco PreView radar formed the basis of the Preco-Eaton-Vorad partnership. It is presently being manufactured in high-volume quantities for several applications. * Improved the performance of the high-speed (sub-nanosecond) analog sampler used in these radars by three orders of magnitude and reduced component cost by over 50%.* Oversaw FCC Part 15 certification for all products.

Small hardware engineering group (promoted to Director in August 1999) designing player tracking hardware (card readers, keypads, networking hubs) and proprietary slot-machine games (lights, sounds, and motors).* Design tasks included a wide variety of analog and digital electronics products based upon embedded processors. Some products included firmware development responsibilities. * Duties also included PCB layout, field diagnostics, compliance support, creation of field diagnostic tools, and technician training.

RF, analog and digital electronics product design for commercial cellular systems and related products. * Design projects included: bi-directional, analog cell-phone repeater amplifier system; active RF filter design (mixer up/down-conversion with high-Q HF filtering of UHF cellular bands); embedded processor-based circuit design and programming for control of feed-forward, cell-tower RF power amplifier; Visual Basic programming, user’s manuals, packaging design, PCB layout and extensive technician training including development and teaching of a series of formal training classes in basic electronics and electromagnetics for experienced RF technicians.

Seattle, Wa

Staff scientist/engineer offering science and engineering services for a wide range of RF, analog and digital products & systems. * Design projects included Phase I and Phase II SBIR quadraxial cable shielding-effectiveness test fixture with software control of test equipment and user's manual; EMI/EMP filtering and equipment cabinet shielding parameters for AC switchgear used in Rail Garrison Peacekeeper Missile project; programming, I/O PCB design and installation of two PC-controlled barcode warehouse access control security systems for Boeing Airplane; a microcontroller-based (68HC11) portable strain-gauge device for measuring bridge wear.

Staff engineer responsible for production improvements in a 200 watt RF pre-amp subassembly used in a microcontroller-supervised 20 kilowatt magnetic resonance imaging amplifier for the General Electric “Signa” MRI system. * Complete responsibility for two technical manuals (a service manual and a proprietary theory of operation manual), management of all UL and IEC certification, and programming the automated test and tune-up for all of the MRI amplifier's sub-assemblies.

Phasar was a small entrepreneurial company trying to bring a flat, low-cost, high-gain, microstrip patch array antenna to market to compete with the Ku-band dish market. The first shuttle explosion delayed Ku-band satellite deployment and this company ran out of funding before the market was ready. * Designed and implemented second-generation improvements in a 256-element, 12 GHz, microstrip patch antenna array and empirically determined the effective dielectric constant for the materials used in this company's unique, patented, ultra-low-cost microstrip process.

Msee, Electromagnetics, Electronics, Optics

Activities and Societies: IEEEThesis: "Coupled Transmission Line Model for Rectangular Microstrip Patch Antennas Coupled Along.

B.S., Engineering Physics

Activities and Societies: Sigma Pi Sigma - Physics Students Honor SocietyStarted out in electrical engineering, then changed.

Education record