The opportunity to work on the Y2k programs at Raytheon came to happen a little by chance. I had already been working on the THURAYA project for a year or more when the subcontractor providing the real-time software to Hughes delayed the project for about 1 year. We temporarily shut down the project and I needed a job.

As luck would have it, there was a great need for engineers with system test experience. I assumed the role of lead test engineer for the upgrades on 3 of our legacy earth station installations:

• BONUM - Moscow, Russia
• AsiaSAT - HK Island, Hong Kong
• BSAT - Japan

Our Y2k effort was a threefold process of identifying bugs, testing the upgrade in a factory environment, and then installing the upgrade at the operational site. This description makes this seem rather simplistic, but it is surprising the number of technical obstacles that come up in an effort like this.

One of the largest challenges for me was the successful installation and configuration of factory testbeds for each project. It is extremely difficult to take a baseline configuration from a site that was originally installed many years ago and somehow reproduce it again. From a testing point of view, however, it is absolutely essential that this is done well. Configuring the test environments properly helped avoid unnecessary complications when we arrived at our sites to install the upgrades.

In June of 1999 I traveled with my team to Moscow to install our new software at the BONUM earth station. Performing any type of upgrade in an operational site is tense enough, but having to disconnect half of their network and then turn the clock forward definitely caused some anxiety. If we made any mistakes it potentially would have caused a large portion of Russian and Eastern Europe to loose television service. Everything went well, though, and we toasted the New Millenium with confidence.