Home and small business network, WiFi, camera and smart home installation services in DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland, and contract engineering in embedded hardware, RF and satellite ground systems
Decorative interactive background: a house floor plan with WiFi access points. Clicking the plan, or focusing keyboard mode and using the arrow keys and enter, mounts up to two access points. Signal strength falls with distance and through walls, and a counter reports how many of the seven rooms are covered.
DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland
Networks that hold up.
Homes that answer to you.
Hardware that ships.
Two halves of one engineering company. Networks, WiFi, cameras and a private smart home for homes and small businesses across the DMV. Circuit boards, radios, solar powered devices and connected fleets for the companies that build products.
Free on-site estimate for local work. No obligation. Published prices are ranges, not quotes.
Satellite, RF or hardware program? See engineering capabilities.
- DC · VA · MD
- On site across the DMV for homes and small businesses
- Remote, national
- Contract engineering for hardware, RF and satellite programs
- Free estimates
- On site, in writing, before any local work starts
- EN · PT · ES
- Service in English, Portuguese and Spanish
The problem
Most of this was never designed. It just accumulated.
Almost every home and small business network we walk into was assembled one device at a time by whoever was available that day. It works until it does not, and then nobody knows why.
Dead zones and dropped calls
One box from the internet provider, in whatever closet the cable entered, expected to cover the whole building. It never was going to.
Everything on one flat network
The cheap camera, the thermostat, last spring's guest and the laptop with your tax returns, all able to reach each other. Nobody planned that.
Nothing to fall back on
The line goes down and the day stops. Payments, calls, cameras. You open a ticket and wait, on the busiest afternoon of the month.
Nobody actually owns it
No documentation, no passwords written down, and nobody who can explain what is plugged into what.
A house full of apps and microphones
Eleven brands, eleven apps, half of them useless the moment the line drops. A light switch six feet away should not need permission from a datacenter.
Every system its own island
The cameras do not know the alarm exists. The door log lives one place and the schedule another, and a person holds all three in their head.
What we do
One company, two kinds of work
The method does not change: measure first, design second, install third, write it all down. What changes is the size of the problem and who is asking.
Homes and small business
16 servicesOn site across DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland
Networks, WiFi and backup internet. Cameras and a smart home that answers to you rather than to an advertising company. The website and the software a small business actually runs on. Surveyed, installed, documented, and handed over with every password and admin login.
- 01Connectivity that works
- 02Smart home and cameras
- 03Secure and always on
- 04The business side
- 05Where nothing exists yet
Engineering
10 practicesRemote and national, scoped per program
Circuit boards, radios, energy budgets and device fleets, for satellite operators, teleports, systems integrators and the companies that build hardware. No van, no free estimate: a written deliverable a technical reviewer can check.
- 01Hardware and PCB Design
- 02Radio Compliance
- 03Firmware and Embedded Linux
- 04Low Power and Solar
- 05Connected Devices
- 06Robotics and Control
- 07RF and Satellite
- 08Network and Security
- 09Infrastructure and Platform
- 10Agentic AI Systems
Engineering tier
The other half is hardware, radios and connected devices
This part of the company is not for homeowners. It is contract engineering for satellite operators, teleports, systems integrators and companies building hardware. Boards designed from schematic through layout, bring-up and design for manufacture. Energy budgets closed against measured draw so a device survives December on harvested power. Fleets that update in the field without going dark. Ground segment and earth station work: link budgets, RF chains, interference, commissioning and acceptance.
It is remote and national rather than on site in the DMV, and it is scoped per program. What usually comes first is one bounded piece of work with a written deliverable a technical reviewer can check against their own measurements.
On the record
- 6 devices
- Consumer products taken from concept through to production.
- 400+ nodes
- Field devices across 20+ deployments, each reporting every 15 seconds.
- 1 RF path
- GNSS and LTE sharing one front end, validated on a vector network analyzer.
- 0 site visits
- A solar sensor whose energy budget closed, so it runs unattended indefinitely.
- 19 gateways
- Ka- and V-band gateway integration across a US ground network.
- 25+ years
- Satellite ground segment experience on the RF side of the team.
Why us
Why Vfonseca Engineering
A small engineering company for the problems most people solve with guesswork. We measure, design, install, document and stand behind the systems our clients run on, whether that is a house, a shop or a product going to production. Meet the engineers behind the company.
Engineers, not box swappers
The diagnosis comes before the shopping list. We measure and design first, then install, so you buy what the building needs and nothing more.
We build this at much larger scale
Circuit boards that go to production, satellite ground stations, and power and comms for construction camps with no grid and no roads. If we can keep those running, your house is a straightforward afternoon.
Local, and actually local
On site across DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland. Not a call center that dispatches a subcontractor you have never met.
You own everything we build
Documentation, passwords and admin access handed over at the end. No subscriptions you cannot cancel, no systems only we can touch.
Explained in plain language
You will understand what we did and why. If an off-the-shelf product would serve you better than anything we could build, we will tell you that too.
English, Portuguese, Spanish
Three languages, which in this region matters more often than you might expect.
Software
We build software too
Dashboards, quoting, stock and scheduling: the internal tools a business actually runs on, with no per-user fees and full ownership handed over at the end.
GD Lens is one we made for ourselves. It started at home, built for the founder's wife, a pregnant mother managing gestational diabetes who wanted a natural home birth. Photograph a meal, get carb counts instantly. Scan a restaurant menu and see every dish ranked. Same instinct as the rest of our work: a real problem, solved properly, for someone who needed it.
Free to read
Learn how this actually works
Plain explanations of the technology, written by someone who builds it. No jargon and nothing to sign up for.
What is an LLM?
The engine behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, explained simply.
5 min readWhat is a Context Window?
The AI's short-term memory, and why it has a limit.
5 min readWhat is an AI Agent?
An AI that doesn't just answer. It acts.
6 min readAgents vs Workflows
Three things people confuse constantly, and how to pick the right one.
7 min readGet a free estimate
Anywhere in DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland. A real number in writing, before anything starts.