Communications & Electronics

These cover just about everything between them.

Comms and electronics is in almost every product from washing machines, cars, mobile phones...RFID tags in library books, anything that has a battery or plugs into the mains.

Civil engineering covers just about everything above and below ground that is bigger than a car that is man made!

Del

<Civil engineering covers just about everything above and below ground that is bigger than a car that is man made!>

Who was it that said, "Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets"?

Ah! But electronics engineers make the weapons more accurate and chemical engineers make them go "poof"!

There used to be a time when there were only electrical engineers. Advances in electronics led to specialization which necessitated the creation of electronics engineers. The creation of the computer led to the rise of the computer engineer.

Instrumentation used to be a mechanical engineer's domain since they operated on pneumatics. When pneumatics gave way to electronics, electronics engineers took over. Specialization resulted in the arrival of the instrumentation engineer.

Evolution

Old Edition:

"Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets"

NeW Edition:

Civil Engineers build structures for Mechanical Engineers to build weapons.

If we are targets, then them included.

Shucks . . . Communications Engineering is part of a larger discipline: Electrical Engineering. Same for Electronics Engineering. Even though you'll be hard pressed to find any technology that doesn't include electronics, there are other Electical Engineering fields where engineers do not deal with the design of electronic circuits. Rather, they integrate systems which have already been developed. Likewise, electrical power systems engineers may only deal with production and/or distribution of electrical energy. Broad field.

Same may be said about Mechanical Engineers or Civil Engineers. Mechanical engineers may design structures, HVAC or other thermal-fluid systems, machines, materials, etc. Civil engineers may design structures, environmental mitigation systems, waterways, etc. Two other broad fields.

Communications is the moving of information and ideas from one point to another. It can be carried out electonically or non-electronically.

Electronics can also control machines, so electronics encompasses more than commuications.

Instruments or sensors often produce readings or measurements that are used to control machines and/or provide humans with information. Electronics are needed to process the readings and measurements into the information used for human consumption or machine control.

I don't know the "official" definition used in engineering textbooks because I haven't taken any college courses in engineering. From what I can see, engineering is the designing of a system or device that meets specifications in order to solve a problem, and includes the determination of what those specifications should be if they are not supplied by the client.

I believe PWSlack would say something like "go ask your teacher!"

i sat in front of the car jacked up in the drive way and looked around to my horror i was surounded by an electronic engineer two computer engeneers and a general nincompoop for all the colected years of schooling and on the job experience they wer no help in making the car go......so ..... my thoughts are these ....

can any engineer look beyond their field and function in the real world....or is the process of making an engineer about like making veal....

i noticed alot of coments about engineers making things work or more acurate i wonder how bad off the people would be if the engineers quit doing their jobs and people had to actualy use their heads more ......

and as i am unable to compete with the deep thoghts left by the rest of the posters i leave you with this when we become dependent on our creations to live how long befor our inventions decide we are the problem and phase us out???

what an insult...

Read my profile...

I can fix my way out of most situations and make just about anything.

Engineering is about creativity...stick an engineer, a manager and an accountant on a desert island and see who is most useful.

What can you do? What do you do?

Del

I agree with Del....!

You're possibly basing you conclusions about engineers on todays graduates, not of graduates from the 70s and earlier, when engineering was a subject all by its own. In my course we studied physics, mechanics, chemistry, etc... only in the final years did we specialise in Electronics (in my case).

Don't label people because of their job title young man!

John....

If you are so smart how come you can't fix it yourself? Pratt

LOL good point Guest!!!

John.

Is the word "Pratt" your signature therefore surname (I had a good friend at school who had this dubious surname....possible) or some nasty/unfriendly comment?

I tend to the former personally.....but I could be wrong!!!

My thoughts, learn to read, write and do the math, most other things fall in line. Like spelling!!!!

Thats funny, I like it!!

This thread reminds of when I left the RN in 1973 and joined Sperry Univac as a CSE...I was working often with old Remington Engineers (Univac had bought them out some years before I believe) that had come to the job via a job with Remington repairing Typewriters.....

Boy did they have trouble learning how to look after the early computers, some got some real bad brain problems.....I felt really sorry for them as technology had simply overtaken them completely......Most retired as quickly as they legally could.

In my early days, they gave me the completely wrong impression of how computers worked, in spite of my studying, I was young and impressionable! I am glad to say that I stuck with it and pulled myself through a lean time.....

Scope! Well every engineering field has its own charm it is basically interest you must look rather than career , every field has scope. Electronics & telecommunication is extended or specialized field of electrical engineering , you see all that fancy gadgets around from pager , mobiles to high end PDAs , wired phones to internet to entertainment to satellite technologies that are related to this field with computer engineering also forming a single stream