Meet the team! Day in the life of a Pico APAC Technical Specialist
21/02/22
Day in the life of a Pico APAC Regional Technical Specialist
Our APAC Regional Technical Specialist is responsible for answering questions from Pico customers in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as developing marketing content and planning events.
How is it to be a Regional Technical Specialist at Pico Technology?
Today we are going to take a closer look on a typical working day from the perspective of our APAC Regional Technical Specialist, Derek Hu.
------
Today when I sit down at my desk, it’s about 8:30 in the morning.
As usual, the first thing for starting today’s work is to check my email box to see if there’s any important notices, urgent questions, company or product news in email and Jostle. The first piece of good news today is the CEO’s special year-end bonus for Chinese New Year. Pico is always insisting on its philosophy: treat customers as friends and employees as family. I am really so glad to be a member of Pico.
Then I check my Wechat chatting box and find two questions left by two customers at late last evening. One question is from a customer of Huawei about PS5000D, and the other, from a PhD student at Fuhan University, concerns PicoVNA 2’s smith chart test results. This involves me offering a quick explanation about the meaning of “L(Inductance)” or “C(Capacitance)” in smith chart display window of PicoVNA2. He doubted its correctness as he calculated a result which was not matched with the result of PicoVNA 2 software. Honestly, I didn’t verify this value in the past. A lot of people find the smith chart quite difficult to understand and, sometimes, so do I!
Both questions are important, but the latter seems a bit more urgent and easier to answer. I check the PicoVNA 106 user’s guide, to no avail. I also read some documents about Smith Chart, in case I missed something about it, but no good findings. I know we can get the Inductive Reactance and Capacitive Reactance directly from the Smith Chart; Inductance appears on the upper half circle, and Capacitor appears on the lower half. Based on that, I think it should be the equivalent inductance or capacitor of the impedance. Then I can verify if it’s correct by simple calculation. Certainly, it’s proved right.
Time goes to 9:30am. I call the Huawei customer to discuss their issue with PS5000D; this was reported by their field engineer in manufacture line. It’s an occasional issue which doesn’t occur very often. Essentially, the scope can’t return the data in its usual time. It’s tough as there are few clues and the manufacture line can’t wait too long, but together we manage to find a solution.
During the meeting with the customer of Huawei, there’s a Skype call which was from a Japanese customer. This customer should have reached the age of retirement but he is still full of energy to enjoy the programming with our PicoScope in labview. I didn’t answer him then and texted him that I will call him back at 10:30 AM around. Now it’s time to talk with him. He is using our PicoScope 2408B for the customized programming in labview and can’t get the correct post-processing result of a pulse as he doesn’t quite understand well about the meanings of some settings like timebase, pre and post trigger points, trigger level etc. His patience impressed me a lot as he has to restart the labview software several times due to the low response of his program when the number of data points is too big. To better explain those settings in labview, I demonstrate the labview example codes of PS 2408B in my site through screen sharing in Skype to him so that he can try different settings in his side. Soon he gets the results as expected.
Just finished the talking with the Japanese customer, I attend the skype call meeting with my manager to talk about some key supporting cases and marketing plan in next half fiscal year. He brings me the second good news of today that the sales revenue of January is quite good.
After the meeting, I check the email and find that there’s an email from a distributor in Singapore asking about the programming with PicoScope 6426E in labview. Her customer used PS 6404D in the past and now needs to switch the codes to PicoScope 6426E. She tells me that the labview example codes downloaded from github.com/picotech for PS 6000E don’t work well. It shows some Sub-Vis are missed. That’s the known issue and I supported her to get it fixed smoothly.
It’s time for lunch. There are many restaurants nearby. I go out to have a bowl of “noodle with shredded pork and pickled cabbage” and a half cage of “Cock Crowed Steamed Soup Bun (a kind of steamed dumpling filled with minced meat and gravy)”. Cooking some quick food, ordering some takeaways, grabbing some fast food nearby, could be my choices when I am working from home.
When I pass by the Express Delivery Cabinet downstairs after lunch, I remember to take the PicoScope 9404-16 and PG 900 demo units sent from a distributor in China. Unfortunately, the PicoScope 9302 was sent back instead of PicoScope 9400-16. However, the questions from the customer in China are all PicoScope 9404 related. In order to answer the questions as soon as possible, I chose to operate our PicoScope 9400 demo unit in our distributor’s office remotely through TeamViewer with support from our distributor for the testing setup. It works very well. The remote-control software does help me a lot to complete the supporting work better and efficiently.
No new questions from call, email, Wechat and Skype at this moment. I am happy to have some time to continue writing the marketing/application article “Acquire and analyze RFID signal with PicoScope” in English. Writing some articles in English is a new try for me with the encouragement from my manager. No doubted that I can improve my English from doing that while contributing the marketing materials. I’m glad to know our company will release the new products “E-cal & TRM/TRL Cal” and I have got the newsletters from the marketing team in the headquarter. As usual, I check and correct the translation in Chinese version, then I release it in Wechat, and share it with my colleague for promotion in variety of channels.
One of our distributors in China calls me now to talk about his customer’s PS 6404D issue. In recent years, more and more PicoScopes are used in the power industry in China. This customer is using our PicoScope 6404D in their testing system for supervising high speed train and railway network. Although PicoScopes are hard and powerful enough, we still recommend the customers to do necessary measures to protect the whole scope as well as the interfaces when they are used in high voltage and strong EMC area.
It's 5:00 PM in China and 9:00 AM in the UK now. It’s time to write email to the UK product managers for the updates of the test results regarding to the new version PicoControl2.dll and to report the bug of PicoSample 4 software.
As planning, I communicate with the customer manager of Aspencore to talk about the banner cooperation in Taiwan and SEA. She said she can offer us 10% discount for 3 months and 50000 impressions/month banner in Taiwan and Asia website respectively.
The customer manager of India EFY calls me to do some survey. Actually, she wants to know what’s our plan in 2022 as our whole year cooperation in 2021 has completed. I ask her to contact with our colleague in India for his idea of the marketing programs plan in India.
Finally, I will do the summaries and minutes of today’s work.
That’s me for the day. In the evening, I will attend ToastMaster Sherrie Su’s online sharing about how to prepare a public speech. ToastMaster English Club has been a part of my life where I can practice my English and extend social activities. Reading some technical articles and books and doing some exercises in the evening are also my favorites besides checking emails and social communication tools regularly to answer those urgent questions or communicating with our UK supporting team about some questions.
