Boy Howdy, Scott35.
wa2ise — One distinction for electrical-engineering specialties seems to be that some do work that affects new or modified real estate, and in a lot of cases PE registration is expected, versus those that deal with complex signal analysis or mega-gate logic and are fluent in physics terminology. I am retired from a place that has many of both. I used to hear that one distinction was that the two factions worked on “opposite sides of the decimal point,” but that was not always the case.
I assure you that linear accelerators and supercomputers involved plenty of work on both “sides.” It was not unusual there to find DC power supplies with sets of 100kVA oil-insulated transfomers and rectifier stacks cooled with deionized water, or 18-section motorized Powersats with thousands of feet of 535kcmil 2kV diesel-locomotive and 350kV-coaxial cable.
Too, there was always some weird synthesis of the two sides—where electricians would use time-domain reflectometers and Dewar flasks as “warm for hours” coffee cups, versus instrumentation techs would routinely use 80kV cable test sets and install NEMA size-4 contactors in their equipment racks. [In many cases both valued a working knowlege of the NEC.]
[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 04-13-2004).]
