Research and Development of Microwave Filter Designs:
Although the radar transponder systems were interesting, the manufacturing support engineering work wasn't what I was truly interested in doing, because I wasn't able to design anything new.
However, I was also allowed to work on a few research and development projects, specifically designing new microwave filters. The radar transponders being developed for up-coming projects all included something called a 'preselector filter', which allowed only a vary narrow range of frequencies to be received.
What made these designs challenging was that with frequencies this high (over 30 GHz) you couldn't use circuit elements - only physical metal structures could be used, so the filters consisted of physical metal structure that looked like organ pipes resonating at specific frequencies.
I designed these physical structures and created mechanical drawings for prototypes which our expert machinists turned into physical objects. We were experimenting with using exotic metal alloys to try to compensate for the extremely large temperature ranges over which these filters needed to operate.