Today, there is an incredible demand and desire in the business world as well as our personal lives to possess the ability to communicate no matter where we are. As a member of the engineering staff at Westinghouse Wireless Solutions Company, I have the exciting and always challenging opportunity to help create groundbreaking wireless communications products. Our latest product, a mobile satellite terminal, provides mobile voice, fax, and data services from anywhere in North America to anywhere in the world. This means people traveling in areas uncovered by cellular networks can now be in touch with civilization by land, sea or air!

At Wireless Solutions, the technical staff works as an “integrated product development team” which includes software, systems, and hardware engineers. We work in a close knit environment to promote design cohesiveness as well as the opportunity for learning across engineering disciplines. As part of this team, my main role has been to design, develop, and test the front-end software of the mobile terminal transceiver. I implement digital signal processing algorithms on specialized microprocessor chips called DSPs. Digital signal processing allows a physical RF (radio frequency) signal to be sampled (quantized into digital words) and mathematically processed in real time by a computer to recover bits of information. Digital signal processing and communications theory are founded in mathematics such as Fourier analysis, linear algebra, complex variables, and stochastic processes. I enjoy this niche of software development since it combines principles of math, computer science, and electrical engineering.