Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (archive)

Frederick "Fritz" Raab

For Frederick "Fritz" Raab, a nearly Iowa native, Iowa State University felt like the natural place to go when he started college in 1964. After all, his family members were natives of Waterloo, Iowa, even though Raab was born in Fort Crook, Nebraska.

When Raab came to Iowa State, he eagerly joined the Sigma Nu fraternity and became involved with the student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). "I enjoyed working with the student IEEE branch. We brought in speakers from different companies to try and educate students on what the world of work was like," he says. "We even did a skit at a banquet once where we poked fun at a lot of the professors, and that was a lot of fun."

Raab also enjoyed being involved in his fraternity. In fact, a lot of Raab's social activities in college revolved around his fraternity. That is how he met his wife, Becky. Well, sort of.

Raab recalls a weekend in the 1967 when his fraternity was putting on a traditional tea to welcome the new housemother. Since Raab had been to many similar teas before, he and his buddy decided to skip town for this one. Their road trip to Waterloo led them to a double blind date. Who would go with whom? Raab says the girls flipped a coin to decide. Becky is fond of saying she won Raab in a coin toss.

Now several years after that coin toss, Raab lives in Vermont with Becky, and owns his own company—Green Mountain Radio Research. "Most of my work is related to high-efficiency power amplifiers—the part of a radio transmitter that makes the signal that's sent out by cell phones, wireless modems, broadcast transmitters, satellites, police radios, and other applications such as magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI)," says Raab. "My designs increase efficiency—the amount of radio signal produced for a given amount of electrical power. This is somewhat like increasing the miles per gallon of an automobile. It also makes the amplifiers smaller and lighter, and in the case of a cell phone, lets you talk longer before having to recharge the battery."

Raab's clients have included the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and several private companies such as Motorola. Raab founded the company in 1980 after spending four years working on radio transmitters and navigation at Cincinnati Electronics in Ohio, and then five years doing radio navigation work and working on a position finding system (which became used as a sensor for virtual reality displays) at Polhemus Navigation Sciences near Burlington, Vermont.

"I had always wanted to have my own company and to have more direct contact with clients," says Raab.

Twenty-six years later, Raab's company continues to be a success, and is one of Raab's proudest accomplishments. Raab's other achievements include receiving an Iowa State Engineering PACE award in 1995 and becoming an IEEE Fellow in 2006. In addition, he's published nearly 100 technical papers and coauthored the classic textbook, Solid State Radio Engineering. He?s currently working on projects such as high-efficiency power amplifiers for military jammers, space-based radar, and MRI.

Raab remembers many practically-oriented electrical engineering classes—communications, control, information theory, random process, antennas, and radio astronomy—that were interesting and provided information he later used in his work. He also recalls being both challenged and supported during his graduate studies by his professors, particularly Paul Bond, Tom Scott, and Grover Brown. He adds that his work on high-efficiency power amplifiers began with the research he did for his PhD dissertation.

In Raab's various business dealings and at engineering conferences he attends, Raab says he's always impressed at the number of Iowa State alumni he meets. "It's funny because out in the East, people don't know Iowa from Ohio or Idaho, but when you go to an engineering conference it's surprising how many ISU grads there are," he says. "The achievements of ISU alums are the best testament to the quality of education ISU provides."

When he isn't working, Raab says he spends his free time on two hobbies he's had since childhood—amateur radio and railroads, both real and model. "I'm quite sure that wiring up my electric trains when I was 6 and 7 had something to do with becoming an electrical engineer," he says.

Raab also enjoys taking photographs and traveling with his wife Becky. Their son, Hans, recently graduated from Arizona State University.

12/19/06

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