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From Wendell Neumeyer/Artex - 7 Dec 05

This is a brief summary of the first MECOP experience for Artex.  It is a success story and has led to our continued membership in MECOP.

Artex designs and manufactures emergency locator beacons (ELT) for aircraft of all types of aircraft.  These ELTs have a crash sensor in them which when activated send a digitally encoded message to satellites which are in place to monitor these beacons and aid Search and Rescue teams in finding the location of an accident site and rescuing the survivors of the accident.

Artex joined MECOP in 2005 after I took over engineering management here.  My previous MECOP experience with another company made this an easy decision for me.  For the company, the decision was made to try it and reevaluate the program after our first experience.

We selected Steve Ullmer as our first MECOP intern.  Steve was a junior in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the time and had been admitted to MECOP through the Preselect Program while still in high school.

Steve joined us for the Spring/Summer internship.  His first week here at Artex was spent working in our manufacturing areas getting to know the various departments/people and actually assembling our products.  While he didn’t necessarily enjoy every task to which he was assigned during that week, he did learn about our products and how they are put together and tested.

We then gave Steve several smaller projects to do.  The purpose here was to evaluate his skills and interests in order to match projects to his abilities.  One example was to measure the radio frequency emissions from our test lab.  The test lab has to be screened so that units under test do not hit the satellites with test transmissions.  We used the measurements Steve took to help define the requirements for a new lab that we were adding to our building.  In doing this, he got familiar with most of our test equipment and he used that knowledge on everything he did for us from that time on.

This was only one of the many smaller jobs that Steve did for us and after a few weeks we found that he was going through the projects at a pace faster than we were creating them.  In addition, the quality of the work he did was excellent.  That’s a nice problem to have.

Another project to mention was that of a test/demo fixture that we wanted to use with our ELTs.

The need for this was created by the myriad of application problems that we get asked to help solve.  Our ELTs can be installed in several different locations in aircraft and sometimes there are problems which are unique.  To try to duplicate them and help our customers was cumbersome at best.  Steve was asked to design a chassis on which we could mount our product(s) and simulate a configuration that could be matched to what the customer was seeing.  To accomplish this, Steve had to get input from his fellow engineers and our tech support person to better define the function of the box.  Steve did the mechanical design and the design of the box wiring and mounting of product(s).  He built the box himself and held a design review meeting upon completion.   The only problem he had in doing this was one that every engineer encounters sooner or later.  He discovered that there is a right way and several wrong ways to buy components through our purchasing department.  We got a couple of laughs and he got valuable experience from this.

Steve worked on and completed several other smaller projects, but the best was saved for last.  We have been in need of a “portable” antenna for our newer ELTs.  We had been having trouble finding engineering time to work on the design.  Steve and one of our senior technicians formed a skunkworks like team and began making and testing prototypes of this antenna.  They created a nearly perfect dipole (trust me, that’s a good thing) antenna which performed beautifully in our lab.  The two of them gave a presentation to our management on the antenna and Steve got to see how just having a fully functioning prototype may/may not be the thing that marketing and sales want to put on the market.  Steve had to return to school before the prototype design was modified enough to suit our sales folks but the project for this antenna was kicked off last week and we expect to have the antenna for sale in late spring of 2006.

At the end of his internship, Steve gave a presentation to our management staff summarizing his experience here and he did a very good job with it.  After he left the room that day, we briefly discussed our continuation in MECOP for 2006.  I am pleased to say that it was a very short discussion and we will be getting our second intern this spring. 

Steve will likely be going to a bigger company for his second internship and when he graduates will have a good feel for the kind of company he wants to work for. While he will no doubt be successful in his class work with or without MECOP experience, he will certainly relate to the material taught in class better because of his experiences with MECOP.