Extreme Engineer of the Month

Jeff Cannon is an engineer who works in telecommunications engineering for ADC, a global supplier of network infrastructure products and services for multiservice networks that deliver data, video, and voice communications. Only four years out of college, he is currently working for a company that develops a number of exciting products to extend the reach of cellular networks, in a variety of ways. One product extends the reach of cellular networks into tunnels by putting a donor antenna outside the tunnel and running fiber optic cable into the tunnel to connect to an antenna inside the tunnel. Another product is a tower-mounted amplifier that gathers the pure signals received at the top of the tower and sends them to the base station for transmission.

One of the most interesting projects Jeff says he’s worked on is called software-defined radio (SDR). This approach can replace hard-wired base stations, which work with only one cellular network, with a solution that includes a multi-processor server, specialized software, and a telephone link. The resulting system can work with several different networks, by way of a software update, which can be done from the carrier’s office. This prevents having to send employees, sometimes hundreds of miles, to remote tower locations for updates. A prime use for this technology is rural carriers that pick up roaming minutes for multiple carriers. It’s a cost-effective technology that is helping to increase the coverage area of networks and fill in coverage gaps around the country. One example of this is the first deployment of the product in rural Texas. With the technology’s flexibility and ability to expand capacity with increased demand, it’s helped smaller carriers increase their roaming revenue so they in turn can invest in covering a larger area and connect many of the smaller towns in Texas. “With a state the size of Texas there are a lot of gaps,” he said.

Jeff says that his work on the software-defined radio project has been a highlight of his career. As a young engineer, he’s been given a lot of responsibility. “They handed the project to me knowing what experience I had and said run with it,” he said. He says that the amount of responsibility and recognition he’s received has been a big stepping stone in his career.

On a current project, he’s part of a team that has been given a clean slate to work on the next generation of an existing product. The team has been looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the current product to find ways to take it to the next step. Management has defined what the product needs to do but has given the team free reign to design how to do it within the basic constraints such as budget and schedule. This product takes an RF signal used in cell phones and converts it to a digital signal that can be transmitted over fiber optic cable, allowing the signal to go long distances without degradation.

Jeff traces his interest in electrical engineering back to middle school and beyond. He was always pulling apart various electronic products to see how they worked, then putting them back together again. In high school he got into computers and tried his hand at programming. He enrolled in pre-engineering in college, at the University of Wisconsin, and decided on electrical engineering. He says it’s been surprising how applicable a lot of the seemingly abstract math and science concepts that he started learning in high school have been in real-life engineering applications. In college, Jeff particularly enjoyed design labs, as well as his summer internships with ADC. He says that having the opportunity to apply what you have learned in the real world creates a solid foundation for further learning, making new concepts easier to understand. In addition to this, he said that the internships helped him decide on which classes to register for in the fall, and ultimately, what field he wanted to go into after graduation.

Jeff says that one benefit of working in telecommunications is that people can actually relate to what he’s working on. “Pretty much everyone can identify with what I do when I say I make products to enhance cellular networks,” he says. “I can pull out the example of how difficult it can be to receive a cell signal in a tunnel, office building, or shopping mall, and they can immediately identify with it.” In addition, he likes working on cutting-edge technology. “I’m reading in trade journals about the various technologies that I have sitting on the desk in front of me that I’m designing and troubleshooting,” he says.