About the President and Founder

James C. Rautio started life on a farm and might still be there but for amateur radio. His father had a pre-World War II "rig" and James was intensely curious. That curiosity drove James to become the first from his family to attend college. James received a BSEE from Cornell in 1978. He then worked for General Electric Space Systems while completing a MS in Systems Engineering from University of Pennsylvania.  In 1982, James transferred to GE Electronics Laboratory in Syracuse, NY. Here he designed monolithic GaAs microwave integrated circuits. Software development was pursued at home by starting Sonnet Software in 1983. In 1986, James completed a Ph. D. at Syracuse University under Roger Harrington.

After completing his Ph. D., he worked for several years as a visiting professor at Syracuse and at Cornell, while continuing to develop the software started during his Ph. D. research. Then, in 1988, he took Sonnet full time. Sonnet's first major sale was in 1989, the same year Sonnet incorporated and hired it's first employee. The following decade was devoted to promoting the acceptance of numerical electromagnetics in the high frequency design cycle. Dr. Rautio was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2000. The following year, he received The Microwave Application Award from The IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S)  “For Development of Widely-Used Full-Wave Electromagnetic Solution Software for the Computation of Printed Circuit Characteristics.” Read the full citation.

 Watch an interview with Jim about amateur radio, Sonnet and the war in Iraq. 
This video was produced for a local news show by WIXT.