The Defence Industry!

Of all the industries, the defence industry is very challenging and interesting for telecom engineers. This industry has developed most of the telecom theories, hardware and software till a few years back. They also have the most budget for research and bringing new technologies into reality. The world’s latest technologies and tools are with them and working for these organisations, you get the pride of serving your country as well. At the same time, the projects are secret. Therefore, your security clearance and monitoring is performed all the time and you cannot leave the country without NOC.

When in 1985, my class of NED University visited the Research labs somewhere in Islamabad and we saw the first night vision binoculars with distance measurement. We also had a look at the laser equipment developed in that institute. All that exposure increased our aptitude for research and development. Similar labs are in operation at several defence research institutes in Pakistan. SUPARCO and Qadeer Labs at Kahota are few labs which are doing research in space and defence industry. There are other companies also that are developing products and acting as representative for vendors.

It is really challenging to develop those missiles that have long distance reach and their telecom part is amazing. Its usage of DSP and algorithms makes the missile reach the target without miss within few meters. The missile is to remain in touch with ground so that it can be tracked. The RADAR systems provide the high power beams to track the missile and aircraft including air RADAR and ground surveillance RADAR. The technologies behind even their antennas are sophisticated and use cutting edge of technology. The Command and Control Systems use communications links so secure that these use frequency- hopping , spread spectrum, encryption and time- hopping at the same time.

Of course, to do these, you need the knowledge and the capability to perform the research, design and development. It is not only the systems operations and maintenance knowledge that you need; you need to know the principles behind the design and how to incorporate the knowledge into the designed product. You can also choose to modify or further develop an existing product to suit your requirements.

Those engineers who are in operations i.e. the actual field usage of these defence hardware and software are the ones who know their performance and also get exposure to the performance of these technologies. They are limited to the parts supplied by vendors and cannot modify the product, but still they get their hands on some of the special engineering designs.

In conclusion, it is a nice research and development as well as operations field for telecom engineers. But, it is not for the faint-hearted. When doing R&D, you have pressures of time, cost, quality and gaining or acquiring knowledge which may not be immediately available some times and requires definite hard work.

Posted on Zumbeel: December 2008