RF engineer interview

I had an interview yesterday with U Mobile, under the Berjaya Group at Berjaya Times Square. This is relatively new telco company and network expansion is on going so.....probably a challenging post on RF planning.

This is a completely technical review of my experience tau. Manalah tau nanti ade yang nak interview telecom in malaysia. In other words, actually, for a technical post it's not that different, interview kat France and Malaysia.

First of all, PREPARE and REVISE. I, lackadaisal as always, did revise 1 page in Wikipedia on UTMS networks. not enough.

First of all, the interviewer launched right into a technical aspect of my CV. What I did on my internships and whether it covered the things he was interested in, in this case, namely telecom architecture and equipments.

Next he asked me to draw my idea of what a 3G network looks like, explaining the elements and protocols involved. So kene pegi whiteboard and THANK GOD for wikipedia!!

Throughout we had a discussion about the elements - he explained a lot of things to me. He even segmented part of the network and asked me things like, in this part of the network, what is the most important?

Next, étape par étape of network designing : Say he gives me an area, Pasir Gudang, say 20 km radius and I have to design a network here. What are the inputs (the info i should ask him) and output (my results).

Starting here I totally kantoi. I mean, yeah, you learn these things but without field experience and in depth understanding of the processes involved these are not things that come naturally.

Answer : I would need number of user (most important, and the only answer that came to mind), and most important in RF designing, i should know what QoS i want to cover, whether indoor or outdoor or in car reacheability (WTF, how would i know that????). The output would be number of Node B I need to cover the area.

Next, what? Design the network, here calculate transmitter power, dbm, loss of signal, size of antenna, blah blah blah to design how tall should my sites (Node Bs) be, where etc.

Next have to go to site, and what kind of attitude to adopt when acquiring sites. Lepas tu testing. What to test? What are your KPIs? Individual sites and cluster cells, how to test?

Ok, aku dah penat describe the interview. Basically, this part, the interviewer talked more than me, I totally bodoh gila here because I don't have field experience.

To sum it up : intense! But it was a good experience sebab i think i learnt a lot. It was interesting, the whole process and the interviewer provided a clear picture of the job involved.

How i did? The architecture part he praised me. But after that quite bangang jugak la. But for a fresh grad, I think that's expected. All in all, dapat ke tak aku tak brape kesah. I think it was a good experience.

Environment, company prospects and corporate values are also important aspects to consider. Yesterday i spent the whole day at Times Square observing the environment seeing as, the whole building is Berjaya ok.

Kepade kawan² yang interview besok : good luck!!