medical cost me $1K+ per month ($170/wk + copays for my ailing wife)
Consider starting your own small business, based on PAT certification.
Like my good friend, Ericgibbs, I started with ground RADAR, but the year was 1979. We also had a data acquisition computer that was in a case about 6' high and 8' long, and had a magnetic core memory. If you opened the door to the computer van while the radar was pointed at it, the radiation would corrupt the core memory. I was working for the US Army back then, and I ended up on a defense site near the Fulda gap, during the height of the Cold War. Then I worked for a company in Tucson, Az that made integrated power amplifiers. I was in the Test Engineering department, and we made all of our own test equipment, as there was nothing commercially available for the power we were working at. I obtained my BSEE during that time, and then moved to California to work in test engineering for a company making static RAM memories. After many years programming memory and VLSI testers, I decided I wanted to become a designer, so I pimped myself out as a designer, and landed a job with a team designing Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) System on a Chip (SOC) and worked that for about 10 years. Finally, my job got sent to India, and I was unceremoniously shown the door. I haven't worked since last July.
For the most part, I've enjoyed my jobs, and I really love the business of creation. I have not enjoyed the management of the business, however. Engineers are under of pressure to produce alot of value, not so much by being creative, but by making large quantities of code or IP. It feels more like working in a factory than creating value through innovation. I've not yet had the opportunity to satisfy my need to create, despite my many years in the field. I envy those on this board who have had those opportunities. I would love to have worked on some of those projects.
I've had fantasies of working for myself. I know that won't be easy. I've wanted to be an engineering consultant that specialized in rapid prototyping and product improvement. To that end, I spent some of my dwindling resources on a FPGA development system, and will spend the next few weeks learning it forward and backwards. The hopefully, I can at some point contract with a firm to help prototype their products. Working from my own lab would be ideal!
I've spent the better part of the last two decades writing code or working on multi-million gate digital integrated circuits, on a highly abstract level, or course. I joined this site because I wanted to get back to basics: volts, amps, transistors, op-amps, etc. I've had some great discussions here on both theoretical and practical issues. My basic electronics knowledge is very rusty, but some of the discussions have helped me to refocus on it, and I've come out a little better. In the future, I might even find the time to do a thorough review of the theory and clean up my underused knowledge base.
