Stephen Varney

There is such a large breadth of knowledge and experience that comes with working at the Laboratory, and people are always willing to help.

What are you currently working on?

My group primarily works on assessing new types of sensing systems — such as radar, jammers or infrared detectors — for the U.S. Air Force. Our most recent project was to build a highly versatile emulator with software-defined radios to help our sponsors answer questions for Air Force operations.

For the most part, I am focused on the integration step of our projects. This entails getting to know many different aspects of a system, from hardware to software to radio-frequency (RF) capabilities. There has been a large learning curve as I am familiar with hardware but needed to come up to speed on the RF and software side of things. Luckily there are so many resources here at the Laboratory — like training courses and on-the-job learning from so many of the talented individuals here.

What do you like about your job?

Working in a lab environment always gives me the ability to go out and use test equipment, test new hardware that has been built, as well as play with new software features on our systems. I have also started preparing briefings for workshops and sponsors, which has been a whole new and exciting learning opportunity. This also really helps me to understand a project from start to finish since I need to be able to present the subject matter in front of experts and answer questions.

I also travel for my job a few times a year since our group has a field site out in Nevada. I have always enjoyed traveling, and what could be better than being paid to travel and see the projects you work on perform in the field? Deploying our emulator and successfully performing its first initial test was extremely rewarding. Once we received all of our data back I was able to present that at our workshop as well as to our sponsors to help answer a lot of their questions and validate our modeling.

What are your future plans for working at the Laboratory?

In the future I hope to expand my knowledge and expertise on ground-based radars. I have been involved in the buildup and integration of these radars, but would love to get more of an education on the design. My RF knowledge is not where I would like it to be but luckily there are so many people I can learn from here.