The engineers behind your network in DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland

Vinicius founded Vfonseca Engineering after thirteen years of building things that have to keep working when nobody is standing next to them. He trained as a mechatronics engineer, which in practice means the electronics, the software, the network and the bracket holding it to the wall are all the same job to him.

For most of the last decade he was the only hardware and firmware engineer at a sensor company in the Washington DC area. He left as its Director of Systems Engineering. Along the way he built solar powered sensors that sit outdoors for years without being touched, took ownership of the cloud that collected their readings, and led the company entry in the XPRIZE Wildfire competition, which reached the finals with a system that spotted a fire and put it out with no one at the controls.

Earlier he took six connected consumer products from a blank sheet to a production line, including the hub that tied them together. In 2022 Technical.ly named him to its RealLIST Engineers list for Washington DC.

He lives in Silver Spring and runs the free estimates himself, so the person who looks at your house is the person who designs the system.

Nailton has spent more than twenty five years on the ground side of satellite communication: the dishes, the radios, and the buildings full of equipment that connect an antenna on the ground to a spacecraft.

Seventeen of those years were at Hughes Network Systems, most recently as an RF engineer in Germantown, Maryland. He ran RF terminal integration for the Jupiter 3 Ka and V band ground segment across nineteen gateways in the United States, designed and maintained the RF architecture of a network operations center carrying nine full transponders, and supported the Orbcomm low earth orbit ground network across Latin America. Before that he led systems engineering and Tier 3 support for Hughes ground gateways throughout Brazil and Latin America, and earlier still installed and operated a broadband satellite hub and commissioned earth stations at Telespazio, NEC and CFOSTER.

Across that work he has commissioned ground stations and small business terminals, pointed and tracked parabolic antennas, written the math that predicts whether a link will hold, and hunted down interference nobody else could find. He advises the company on satellite and long range radio: what a given site can realistically receive, where an antenna has to go, and why a link that looks fine on paper drops out in heavy rain.