>>2583962>Is it something you could do for a long time?Climbing isn't an old-man's game. I'm sure at some point I'll get to a point where I can't run up and down 50ft towers at 13,000ft elevation.
The engineering side is something I could probably retire to. Or I go back to a desk job [barfing noise intensifies].
>I've got a boring office job and I love rock climbing, this shit looks sick.I came from an office job. Comfy salary, but offices are where dreams go to die. Buyout/merger, some pretty bad management failures on product releases, generally got overworked and burned out with it. Bailed, restructured my companies, and gave it a go full-time.
Rock climbing and industrial climbing are fairly different worlds. Dynamic ropes, wire-gate carabiners, tiny little harnesses, fall factors rock climbers regularly expose themselves to... that stuff scares the shit out of me. I'm sure some skills translate, but the gear and processes don't really cross over.
>>2583972If you've got a solid electronics and rf background, that's a good start.
Learn the ins/outs of a couple manufacturers (cambium, mikrotik, trango, mimosa, ubiquiti for microwave; motorola, kenwood/efj, bk radio, tyt/hytera chinese shit in the lmr world). If you understand DMR or P25 programming enough to program a Motorola, programming a Kenwood is pretty easy once you wrap your head around how that other company's workflow is designed and what they call some of the features isn't too hard to pick up.
Then there's all the accessories and weird shit you'll see and deal with ... radio over IP boards, digital/telemetry stuff, multi-siting/simulcast/voter stuff, RoIP/VoIP/phones... have an "engineering mindset" to figure out the solution to a problem.
With a .mil background, a lot of guys end up going for local/state/federal radio shops. Bigger systems, bigger budgets, but you're still sorta with daddy gov and all the bullshit that comes with it.
Generator/ATS works again.
