Don Lancaster: RIP...

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 1:27:05 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:

On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 8:10:25 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 8:16:31 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 2:11:29 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

He\'s seeing something that doesn\'t exist, because that\'s what he wants to see.

I see you as a clone of \'Always Wrong\'. A pathetic troll, with nothing but hatred in his life.

Decadent Linux User Numero Uno didn\'t fit that description, and neither do I. Krw - who labelled him \"always wrong\" is a much closer fit.

No, you are closer in that you love to piss everyone off.

I certainly don\'t irritate everybody, and while certain right wing lunatics do take offense at being corrected, I don\'t do it because I want to piss them off - I just want to point out that what they are posting is factually incorrect. As you are here.

A loser who can never answer a direct question. Tell us, how much test equipment you have, and that you actually know how to use.

Nothing much. There\'s a small digital voltmeter, and an equally small LCR bridge.
There\'s some software on my home computer that lets me use the audio port as a slow oscilliscope. I do know how to use all of them, and quite a lot more beside.

I currently have over 150, and I have multiple workbenches in my 1200 square foot shop.

You live in the boondocks and can afford that kind of space. I live in the centre of Sydney where space is more expensive.

You have no imagination.

There are couple of patents that say otherwise.

For instance, I see al kinds of \'projects\' for electronic locks using microprocessors, or a fist full of logic IC\'s. 30 years ago I used a non matrix keypad, (16 button with a single common) along with a 4017 IC, a few capacitors, resistors and a pass transistor. You could have up to a 10 digit code. It had a five second delay, if you entered the wrong code. Pressing any key after it was unlocked, locked it.

If I needed that I could buy it.

That doesn\'t surprise my, because you wouldn\'t take 10 minutes to prototype and test an idea.

Only if you had a collection of the relevant junk, and even then all you could put togehter would be a proof of principle experiment - no potential customer would see it as any kind of prototype.

Trivia: Skolnik was the surname of one of the characters in the movie, \'Revenge of the Nerds\'.

Around 1990, I was buying and repairing 4 GHz LNAs. I built a modulated signal generator to tes them, and to repair C band satellite receivers. A little imagination provided a noise source to test the LNAs on the bench. A standard 4 foot Florescent lamp generates noise well past 4GHz, so waving an LNA/LNB past one would show as an increase in the video level on a receiver.

So what?

Have you ever seen Merrill Skolnik\'s \'RADAR Handbook\'?

Why would I want to?

It is the reference for microwave design. Of course, you would never pay $200 for a book, like that. That\'s just as well, because you wouldn\'t understand it.

I\'ve got two texts on Microwave design ISBN 0-471-91277-8 and 0-412-34160-3, which I bought i the UK about 35 years ago for about 20 pounds each
I got them for project that used 500psec wide pulses and we were looking at getting that down to 100psec, but it wasn\'t radar.

Skolnik\'s work inspired many of the early Satellite TV designs. They were a far cry from the IEEE\'s predicted 100 foot dishes that used a diode mixer at the feedhorn.

I\'m sure that it was relevant to that business. It\'s not one that I was ever paid to take an interest in.

I received a letter from the FCC on a Friday. It wanted to know how we were monitoring the tower lights at an unmanned site. If we didn\'t have a system in place, they listed a couple approved units that were in the thousands of dollars. When I got home that day, I went t my shop and built a system. I used a 1.024 MHz crystal oscillator, followed by a divide by 1000 circuit. This gave a stable, 1024 Hz square wave. That twas fed through a low pass filter. Then I used a current transformer to monitor the current for the lights. This was rectified and used to gate the audio signal, which was fed into a spare audio channel on the STL. At the new site, the audio was detected, and used to drive a LED at Master Control.

Seems a bit indirect. Pointing a photodector at the lights would be more direct. Use a micro to look at the photodector output and to tell site local area network what the photodetector is seeing.

No, I had 25 of the modules on hand. I would have had to order a crystal, and waited at least a week. That would have put me past the deadline, an a single crystal plus shipping was much higher than a 50 cent surplus oscillator module.

You have no concept of tower lighting.

Why should I?

> A 300 foot tower ha about 20 steady and strobe lights mounted on all four sides, and many were not visible from the tower base.Your method is total crap, because you would need a detector at every lamp. The FAA must be notified as soon as possible when any of the lighs fail, because most towers are in at least one flight path.

But your scheme didn\'t offer that. A solid cheap state photo detector looks just like a LED (and you can use LED as photodetector. though they are pretty insensitive).

One per light would be perfectly affordable.

> Typical of your lack of thought. There weren\'t Local Area Networks in 1987.

There were lots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet

goes back to 1968. I got a job on 1979 because I\'d read the special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE on the subject from cover to cover.

> There wasn\'t even a phone line sat the site so you couldn\'t use a computer to call long distance. The 7 GNz link was already in place, ad the third audio channel was for the studio to talk to Master Control at the tower site.

Sounds primitive.

The new tower was 1700 feet, and the top was often hidden by clouds. At times, the top of the 300 foot tower was hidden, as well.

Dividing down from 1.024 MHz to get a 1024 Hz square wave is extravagant. Dividing a 32768 Hz watch crystal oscillator by 32 would have got you exactly the same result more cheaply and consumed less current.

snipped the rest of the boasting

I also find it amusing that you are a chemist who couldn\'t find a job..

I was never unemployed from the day I graduated as a Ph.D. chemist in 1970 until I got made redundant by Cambridge Instrument in 1991 - and I was back in work within ten days of that. I was working as fairly high powered electronic engineer for most of that time, supervising technicians who were quite a bolshy as you are. Because I had the capacity to fix stuff that they couldn\'t, I did earn some respect.

I had the EEs come to me to ask questions about some older products, and the newest test equipment. They could walk 600 feet to my area, or spend hours digging through old records, and equipment manuals.

So what?

<snipped more irrelevant boasting>

> I was given the jobs that other couldn\'t finish, or just didn\'t want to do. I wrote ECOs to eliminate the common problems. I also consulted with our Metrology lab to troubleshoot the digital sections of a lot of HP equipment.

Didn\'t we all? At Cambridge Instruments we called them modifications, rather than equipment change orders. The technicians used to churn them out and the engineers had to review them and either chuck them out - half the time the technicians didn\'t like the proper setting up procedure and had improvised their own which didn\'t work, and then wanted the equipment changed in a way that they thought would make their lame setting up procedure work.

Other change orders changed the design to use parts that we could buy when the original parts had gone obsolete. Some of them got quite interesting.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Michael Terrell]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 1:05:21 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 1:27:05 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 8:10:25 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 8:16:31 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 2:11:29 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

He\'s seeing something that doesn\'t exist, because that\'s what he wants to see.

I see you as a clone of \'Always Wrong\'. A pathetic troll, with nothing but hatred in his life.

Decadent Linux User Numero Uno didn\'t fit that description, and neither do I. Krw - who labelled him \"always wrong\" is a much closer fit.

No, you are closer in that you love to piss everyone off.
I certainly don\'t irritate everybody, and while certain right wing lunatics do take offense at being corrected, I don\'t do it because I want to piss them off - I just want to point out that what they are posting is factually incorrect. As you are here.
A loser who can never answer a direct question. Tell us, how much test equipment you have, and that you actually know how to use.

Nothing much. There\'s a small digital voltmeter, and an equally small LCR bridge.
There\'s some software on my home computer that lets me use the audio port as a slow oscilliscope. I do know how to use all of them, and quite a lot more beside.

I currently have over 150, and I have multiple workbenches in my 1200 square foot shop.

You live in the boondocks and can afford that kind of space. I live in the centre of Sydney where space is more expensive.

You have no imagination.

There are couple of patents that say otherwise.

For instance, I see al kinds of \'projects\' for electronic locks using microprocessors, or a fist full of logic IC\'s. 30 years ago I used a non matrix keypad, (16 button with a single common) along with a 4017 IC, a few capacitors, resistors and a pass transistor. You could have up to a 10 digit code. It had a five second delay, if you entered the wrong code. Pressing any key after it was unlocked, locked it.

If I needed that I could buy it.

That doesn\'t surprise my, because you wouldn\'t take 10 minutes to prototype and test an idea.

Only if you had a collection of the relevant junk, and even then all you could put togehter would be a proof of principle experiment - no potential customer would see it as any kind of prototype.
Trivia: Skolnik was the surname of one of the characters in the movie, \'Revenge of the Nerds\'.

Around 1990, I was buying and repairing 4 GHz LNAs. I built a modulated signal generator to tes them, and to repair C band satellite receivers.. A little imagination provided a noise source to test the LNAs on the bench. A standard 4 foot Florescent lamp generates noise well past 4GHz, so waving an LNA/LNB past one would show as an increase in the video level on a receiver.

So what?

Have you ever seen Merrill Skolnik\'s \'RADAR Handbook\'?

Why would I want to?

It is the reference for microwave design. Of course, you would never pay $200 for a book, like that. That\'s just as well, because you wouldn\'t understand it.

I\'ve got two texts on Microwave design ISBN 0-471-91277-8 and 0-412-34160-3, which I bought i the UK about 35 years ago for about 20 pounds each
I got them for project that used 500psec wide pulses and we were looking at getting that down to 100psec, but it wasn\'t radar.

Skolnik\'s work inspired many of the early Satellite TV designs. They were a far cry from the IEEE\'s predicted 100 foot dishes that used a diode mixer at the feedhorn.
I\'m sure that it was relevant to that business. It\'s not one that I was ever paid to take an interest in.
I received a letter from the FCC on a Friday. It wanted to know how we were monitoring the tower lights at an unmanned site. If we didn\'t have a system in place, they listed a couple approved units that were in the thousands of dollars. When I got home that day, I went t my shop and built a system. I used a 1.024 MHz crystal oscillator, followed by a divide by 1000 circuit. This gave a stable, 1024 Hz square wave. That twas fed through a low pass filter. Then I used a current transformer to monitor the current for the lights. This was rectified and used to gate the audio signal, which was fed into a spare audio channel on the STL. At the new site, the audio was detected, and used to drive a LED at Master Control.

Seems a bit indirect. Pointing a photodector at the lights would be more direct. Use a micro to look at the photodetector output and to tell site local area network what the photodetector is seeing.

No, I had 25 of the modules on hand. I would have had to order a crystal, and waited at least a week. That would have put me past the deadline, an a single crystal plus shipping was much higher than a 50 cent surplus oscillator module.

You have no concept of tower lighting.

Why should I?

Why comment about something that you know nothing about?

A 300 foot tower has about 20 steady and strobe lights mounted on all four sides, and many were not visible from the tower base.Your method is total crap, because you would need a detector at every lamp. The FAA must be notified as soon as possible when any of the lights fail, because most towers are in at least one flight path.

But your scheme didn\'t offer that. A solid cheap state photo detector looks just like a LED (and you can use LED as photodetector. though they are pretty insensitive).

Sure. You are going to climb a 300 foot tower 20 times to install diodes and the wiring. install one at every light, n a 1.3 MW UHF RF field? This was in Central Florida. Lightning storms would destroy them, quite often. Once again, you are showing your ignorance Tower get struck quite often, The EMP that generates destroys semiconductors. You would also have to use a hand full of logic chips to monitor your useless diodes.

I had a digital thermometer explode one day in my home shop. It was battery powered, and the lead to the sensor aw only two feet. That strike behind my shop also fried a SVGA computer monitor that wasn\'t connected to anything.. Now power cord, and the video cable was wrapped around its base. It fried the video input IC. The current transformer allowed me to detect a single failed lamp accurately, in all weather conditions. It was a simple and reliable design, that the FCC accepted. They would have rejected your fantasy system as useless.



> One per light would be perfectly affordable.

It would be insanely expensive to install. A tower crew was $75 per hour, per crew member. It could take up to two weeks too install that us;less design.

Typical of your lack of thought. There weren\'t Local Area Networks in 1987.
There were lots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet

Not in the TV field. The computers were using RS232 terminals. We had an Altos 586, five user system. There was no computer at the transmitter site because there had never ben a need for one. That transmitter was built in 1950, so it was all tube.. It was only being used as a relay point, and for a two meter repeater. Also, it would require a lot of filtering to prevent front end overload for that crude system. We already had an existing link that far exceeded what that crap system could do. I doubt that it could make the 45 mile hop, as well. The two antennas had to be near the tops of the tower to maintain line of sight.

goes back to 1968. I got a job on 1979 because I\'d read the special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE on the subject from cover to cover.
There wasn\'t even a phone line sat the site so you couldn\'t use a computer to call long distance. The 7 GHz link was already in place, ad the third audio channel was for the studio to talk to Master Control at the tower site.

Sounds primitive.

Yawn. It was an unmanned site. Why have a phone there? It had been turned off, because there was a phone in the Engineer\'s house nearby.We were only there a few hours a year, ntil I removed the transmitter for another station to use it.

The new tower was 1700 feet, and the top was often hidden by clouds. At times, the top of the 300 foot tower was hidden, as well.

Dividing down from 1.024 MHz to get a 1024 Hz square wave is extravagant. Dividing a 32768 Hz watch crystal oscillator by 32 would have got you exactly the same result more cheaply and consumed less current.

Once again, you are jumping to conclusions, because of your ignorance. I had one business day to have it built, tested and installed. Since the site was shut down, it was no longer air conditioned. The oscillator module was sealed, so the high humidity wouldn\'t affect it. It was a typical windowless concrete block transmitter building, which stayed humid without A/C. You talked about wasting power for the oscillator module, but this crap design of yours would use a lot more. Also, there was 400A three phase power at the site that was no longer needed..

I had the EEs come to me to ask questions about some older products, and the newest test equipment. They could walk 600 feet to my area, or spend hours digging through old records, and equipment manuals.

So what?

Sigh, you are showing both your arrogance and ignorance, as usual. I was interviewed to be the Component engineer. Instead, they hired a woman with a degree, in Philosophy, because she was the Engineering Director\'s girlfriend. He had your attitude. She lasted two months, he lasted three before everyone refused to put up with his crap. The first thing she did was fill a dumpster with all of our databooks, and manuals for our licensed software. Her excuse was that her office was too small, so she was taking the larger room. Then she had the nerve to ask me to do her work. She had no idea what Failure Analysis was, and her idea of creating an Item Master was to photocopy a catalog page and draw a circle around the part number.

He wanted to scrap their effective, long term part numbering system with the value of the part. He got pissed when I reminded him that we used 14 different 10K resistor types. His system would only recognize one, as \'10KR\'.

I was given the jobs that other couldn\'t finish, or just didn\'t want to do. I wrote ECOs to eliminate the common problems. I also consulted with our Metrology lab to troubleshoot the digital sections of a lot of HP equipment.

Didn\'t we all? At Cambridge Instruments we called them modifications, rather than equipment change orders. The technicians used to churn them out and the engineers had to review them and either chuck them out - half the time the technicians didn\'t like the proper setting up procedure and had improvised their own which didn\'t work, and then wanted the equipment changed in a way that they thought would make their lame setting up procedure work.

I asked for those jobs, because easy worked bored me to tears. I was refused, and told to take the next job on the list. so I gamed the system to get all the tough jobs.

ECO is \'Engineering Change Order\' which a real engineer would know. I had Design group refuse one ECO. I had the VP of that division come to me, looking for some equipment. I handed him the paperwork and told him that it was ready to ship, but they refused to sign the change. He was back, in five minutes with five signatures from our Design group. He said that he told them to sign or they were fired.


> Other change orders changed the design to use parts that we could buy when the original parts had gone obsolete. Some of them got quite interesting.

You snipped that part of my job was to certify new components. I also introduced new ly developed components that improved the equipment. For instance, our most popular base model used a paitrof Dallas battery backed NVRAM, but NASA didn\'t allow Lithium batteries in space. I found the Capstore which had just hit the market, witch solved that problem. They are now obsolete, This can be used as a modern replacement: FM16W08-SG – FRAM (Ferroelectric RAM) Memory IC

It\'s obvious that you couldn\'t handle Mission Critical work. Like an allowable 15 minute downtime or have to close an air field. Try repairing a studio TV camera, during a live show. You couldn\'t make any noise, or power it down. I did that during a week long Telethon when the power supply boards started failing from overheating. You had to turn the fans off when the studio was live, and it fried a lot of electrolytics after several 24 hour days without a fan. I made many trips into live radio and TV studios for emergencies. They were in use 24 hours a day, so there was no way to schedule downtime. It\'s a whole different mindset

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 20:27:00 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell
<terrell.michael.a@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 8:10:25?AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 8:16:31?PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 2:11:29?AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

He\'s seeing something that doesn\'t exist, because that\'s what he wants to see.

I see you as a clone of \'Always Wrong\'. A pathetic troll, with nothing but hatred in his life.

Decadent Linux User Numero Uno didn\'t fit that description, and neither do I. Krw - who labelled him \"always wrong\" is a much closer fit.

The jerk called himself Massive Prong, which I translated to Mini
Thong and then later to Always Wrong.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:12:26 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 1:05:21 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 1:27:05 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 8:10:25 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 8:16:31 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 2:11:29 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

<snip>

You have no concept of tower lighting.

Why should I?

Why comment about something that you know nothing about?

I do know enough about it to know that your solution doesn\'t address the problem - as you admitted. You do need to monitor that every lamp is emitting light not just drawing current, and your solution didn\'t even warn you if one of the lamps wasn\'t drawing current.

> ECO is \'Engineering Change Order\' which a real engineer would know.

A real engineer who had worked for your company, back when you did.

<snip>

> You snipped that part of my job was to certify new components. I also introduced newly developed components that improved the equipment.

Didn\'t we all?

> It\'s obvious that you couldn\'t handle Mission Critical work.

Who knows. The commercial electronic firms I worked for didn\'t go in for that kind of stuff.

There were occasions where people found out that stuff needed fixing at the last minute and I did pitch in, but it didn\'t happen often - having the managing director hovering didn\'t help, but I knew him well enough to send him up when he got too anxious.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Michael Terrell]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 11:22:12 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:12:26 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:

Why comment about something that you know nothing about?
I do know enough about it to know that your solution doesn\'t address the problem - as you admitted. You do need to monitor that every lamp is emitting light not just drawing current, and your solution didn\'t even warn you if one of the lamps wasn\'t drawing current.

The rectified output from the current transformer was fed to a comparator, that gated thee 1024 Hz square wave, before it was filtered to a sine wave. The input had a ten turn potentiometer to set the trip level, so it did exactly what I said. No matter how you spin it, it worked as designed or the FCC\'s engineers would have made us replace it with a commercial system that required an expensive leased phone line. It would have been about $5,000 a year. because of the distance.

There had already been one TV broadcast tower destroyed when the wing of an airplane snapped the guy lines on one side. You have no idea how stringent they are, and the FAA is even worse. Your lack of insight and comprehension is obvious. Rather than ask questions for what you don\'t understand, you simply hand down your worthless decree, from on high. Just lake a bad Army Officer I had to deal with. He informed me that he not only didn\'t have to comply with the safety regulations at the TV station, but he tried to confiscate all of the equipment manuals. The issue was escalated well above his pay grade, and he was ordered to stay the hell out of the control/transmitter room and studio. The irony was it was the same Two Star General, who promoted me that handed his head to him. He was informed that his fit did indeed stink, and I had the authority to have him arrested for entering the off limits area.

 

[Michael Terrell]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:52:07 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 20:27:00 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell

The jerk called himself Massive Prong, which I translated to Mini
Thong and then later to Always Wrong.

He had over 100 stupid names to avoid filters. He, like Sloman spouted inane nonsense. Neither are capable of looking at a problem before declaring any solution to be useless. Sloman called the current monitor design Extravagant, and useless, without knowing anything about it. It was on abut six square inches of perf board, since there wasn\'t time to have a double sided board made. It worked on iniital power up and only required calibration. You know that feeling, especially when under a very short deadline. I had about 40 hours before I had to mail the reply to the FCC. I used all COTS components that I had on hand. and the station already had the 30A current transformer. I knew what I was going to need as soon as I read the letter, and verified that we had a spare audio channel between the sites. You\'ve dealt with military and government projects, many times, so you know the intricacies. Th entire unit fit into a standard plastic electrical box, and as far as I know it was still working until the old transmitter site was sold to someone to build another independent TV station.

BTW, I thought of him as \'Ding Dong. ;-)

When did he disappear? I was off of here for many years, until Phil tracked me down.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 2:33:33 AM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 11:22:12 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:12:26 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:

Why comment about something that you know nothing about?
I do know enough about it to know that your solution doesn\'t address the problem - as you admitted. You do need to monitor that every lamp is emitting light not just drawing current, and your solution didn\'t even warn you if one of the lamps wasn\'t drawing current.

<snipped Michael evading the point, at length.>

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 2:49:12 AM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:52:07 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 20:27:00 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell

The jerk called himself Massive Prong, which I translated to Mini
Thong and then later to Always Wrong.
He had over 100 stupid names to avoid filters. He, like Sloman spouted inane nonsense.

He did post stuff that right-wing lunatics like krw didn\'t want to hear, and tried to claim was inane.

> Neither are capable of looking at a problem before declaring any solution to be useless. Sloman called the current monitor design extravagant, and useless, without knowing anything about it.

I pointed out that dividing down a 1.024 MHz crystal oscillator output by 1000 to get 1024 Hz square wave was extravagant, when you could get the same waveform more cheaply by dividing down a 32,768 Hz watch crystal oscillator by 32.

I didn\'t say anything about useless, and you\'d told us quite enough about that bit of the circuit to make it clear that that bit of it was extravagant..

> BTW, I thought of him as \'Ding Dong. ;-)

You would.

> When did he disappear? I was off of here for many years, until Phil tracked me down.

He doesn\'t show up often these days.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Michael Terrell]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 12:58:44 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 2:49:12 AM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:52:07 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 20:27:00 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell

The jerk called himself Massive Prong, which I translated to Mini
Thong and then later to Always Wrong.
He had over 100 stupid names to avoid filters. He, like Sloman spouted inane nonsense.
He did post stuff that right-wing lunatics like krw didn\'t want to hear, and tried to claim was inane.

Neither are capable of looking at a problem before declaring any solution to be useless. Sloman called the current monitor design extravagant, and useless, without knowing anything about it.

I pointed out that dividing down a 1.024 MHz crystal oscillator output by 1000 to get 1024 Hz square wave was extravagant, when you could get the same waveform more cheaply by dividing down a 32,768 Hz watch crystal oscillator by 32.

In you opinion. A real engineer would have poised it as a question, not condemn, out of hand. \'Why did you chose the oscillator module, instead of a crystal? You could have used a 32.768 KHz watch crystal in its place\' The entire design was from spare parts that were in the 50 drawer parts cabinets that covered the back of my workbench. Over 600 drawers of parts to build prototypes. Your crystal would have required a binary counter, when decade counters are more common. Buying ICs that would only be used in one prototype is extravagant. It was a one off, not a commercial product so shaving off a few pennies doesn\'t matter. What mattered was the end result. No design review, no months of planning, and no budget meetings. I\'ve been through all that, along with ISO9001 implementation

This attitude of yours is why no one likes you.

> I didn\'t say anything about useless, and you\'d told us quite enough about that bit of the circuit to make it clear that that bit of it was extravagant.

Only in your small, narrow mind. You are incapable of ever admitting to a mistake. Unlike you, I went for a robust design for a harsh environment. I\'ve rarely found a bad oscillator module, but I\'ve seen a lot of defective watch crystals. In fact, I save the modules from old computer motherboards, and can often find one on a frequency I need. You sound like the Old Radio hacks who scream that every capacitor should be replaced, before repairing any electronics. One insisted that a HP3325A Function generator needed this. It would take most of them weeks to change all the caps. In reality, they would likely destroy the circuit boards.

http://www.ko4bb.com/getsimple/index.php?id=manuals&dir=HP_Agilent/HP_3325A_Synthesizer

You worked in a tiny world in the field of Electronics. I started to build things at 10 years old, and I was working in a shop at 13 to repair equipment. You are not a \'Team Player\', and you can not accept anyone else\'s ideas.. You never discuss, you mandate.

The best engineers that I\'ve worked with started as hobbyists or Amateur Radio operators while they were still in school, not someone who drifted into the field later in life. I\'ve seen several with your attitude get fired. I was asked several times why I didn\'t have an EE degree, but they understood the military school. Most of the engineers would accept my input, even though I was assigned to a different department. I was given special products for Engineering, from time to time. The last was to take a prototype $80,000 receiver system from a working prototype, into production. This included upgrading or in house PCB assembly, or reflow process. I built test fixtures, and prodded he programmers to simplify programing new boards, By working together, most of the programming was done by connecting to our in hose servers, and booting the unit from an external floppy drive. It reduced the programing time from a full day, to about 20 minutes. What did you ever build that could be reconfigured thousands of miles away, or install new firmware? How many used 14 microprocessors? Have you ever worked wit FIR ICs?

What kind of equipment did Cambridge make? It appears that there were several companies with that name, yet very little actual information about their products.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 12:32:36 AM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 12:58:44 AM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 2:49:12 AM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:52:07 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 20:27:00 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell

The jerk called himself Massive Prong, which I translated to Mini
Thong and then later to Always Wrong.
He had over 100 stupid names to avoid filters. He, like Sloman spouted inane nonsense.
He did post stuff that right-wing lunatics like krw didn\'t want to hear, and tried to claim was inane.

Neither are capable of looking at a problem before declaring any solution to be useless. Sloman called the current monitor design extravagant, and useless, without knowing anything about it.

I pointed out that dividing down a 1.024 MHz crystal oscillator output by 1000 to get 1024 Hz square wave was extravagant, when you could get the same waveform more cheaply by dividing down a 32,768 Hz watch crystal oscillator by 32.
In you opinion. A real engineer would have posed it as a question, not condemn, out of hand. \'Why did you chose the oscillator module, instead of a crystal? You could have used a 32.768 KHz watch crystal in its place\' The entire design was from spare parts that were in the 50 drawer parts cabinets that covered the back of my workbench.

That wasn\'t made clear, though it was pretty obvious.

> Over 600 drawers of parts to build prototypes. Your crystal would have required a binary counter, when decade counters are more common.

Not in any l.ab I\'ve worked in.

> Buying ICs that would only be used in one prototype is extravagant.

A \"protoptype\" is the first of series. If you were putting together a one-off kluge just to get the FAA off your neck, it wasn\'t a prototype.

> It was a one off, not a commercial product so shaving off a few pennies doesn\'t matter. What mattered was the end result. No design review, no months of planning, and no budget meetings. I\'ve been through all that, along with ISO9001 implementation.

And the end result monitored the lamps current consumption, not the light coming out of them, which was was the FAA wanted pilots to be able to see.

> This attitude of yours is why no one likes you.

Except the people who relied on the circuits I\'d designed.

I\'m pretty popular with them.

I didn\'t say anything about useless, and you\'d told us quite enough about that bit of the circuit to make it clear that that bit of it was extravagant.

Only in your small, narrow mind. You are incapable of ever admitting to a mistake. Unlike you, I went for a robust design for a harsh environment. I\'ve rarely found a bad oscillator module, but I\'ve seen a lot of defective watch crystals. In fact, I save the modules from old computer motherboards, and can often find one on a frequency I need.

Not the attitude of somebody who designs stuff for production.

> You sound like the Old Radio hacks who scream that every capacitor should be replaced, before repairing any electronics. One insisted that a HP3325A Function generator needed this. It would take most of them weeks to change all the caps. In reality, they would likely destroy the circuit boards.

I\'m a fan of \"if it ain\'t broke\" don\'t fix it. Electrolytic capacitors weren\'t well treated by some old-fashioned designers, but I would recommended replacing even them if there wasn\'t something obviously wrong with them

> You worked in a tiny world in the field of Electronics. I started to build things at 10 years old, and I was working in a shop at 13 to repair equipment. You are not a \'Team Player\', and you can not accept anyone else\'s ideas. You never discuss, you mandate.

Bizarre misconception. You don\'t seem to be equipped to follow the discussions that have happened here, or you wouldn\'t have posted that downright lie..
As for not being a \"team player\", I\'ve been a constructive member of lots of teams - which has involved telling all of them that they have got stuff wrong. but not all that often.

> The best engineers that I\'ve worked with started as hobbyists or Amateur Radio operators while they were still in school, not someone who drifted into the field later in life.

Your idea of what constitutes a good engineer seems to be a bit odd.

> I\'ve seen several with your attitude get fired.

What attitude is that? Skepticism about your engineering skills?

> I was asked several times why I didn\'t have an EE degree, but they understood the military school. Most of the engineers would accept my input, even though I was assigned to a different department. I was given special products for Engineering, from time to time. The last was to take a prototype $80,000 receiver system from a working prototype, into production. This included upgrading our in house PCB assembly, or reflow process.

Was that a surface mount board? Reflow happens after pick and place - it\'s not the whole of PCB assemby by any means.

> I built test fixtures, and prodded the programmers to simplify programing new boards, By working together, most of the programming was done by connecting to our in house servers, and booting the unit from an external floppy drive. It reduced the programing time from a full day, to about 20 minutes. What did you ever build that could be reconfigured thousands of miles away, or install new firmware? How many used 14 microprocessors? Have you ever worked with FIR ICs?

The electron beam microfabricators I worked on were spread around the western world - two ended up in Australia. The software was shipped internationally by e-mail from early on, long before there was an internet.

The original design was pretty old and predated microprocessors. There was a VAX build into the system somewhere, but I didn\'t get anywhere near it.

What\'s an FIR IC? I know about finite impulse filters and have used them from time to time but the ones I used would have been hard to integrate - I ended up trimming the taps on one of them to 0.1%, and while you could do that with a laser trimmer, it wouldn\'t have made sense in that application. Far Infra-Red imaging IC\'s exist, but they are exotic and expensive. Silicon won\'t hack it., and while I have worked with GaAs integrated circuits they weren\'t optical sensors

> What kind of equipment did Cambridge make? It appears that there were several companies with that name, yet very little actual information about their products.

The company I world for was called Cambridge Instruments. It made electron microscopes. It was a mess.

The original company - Cambridge Scientific Instruments - was set up by Horace Darwin - Charles Darwin\'s youngest son - in 1881

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Darwin

It got big and eventually fell apart in the 1970\'s. The bit I joined in 1982 was the unprofitable rump that made electron microscopes that got left over after all the profitable bits had been sold off. It had got merged with another high tech company - Metals Research that made an image analysis machine and a GaAs single crystal pulling machine (both of which I worked on for a bit) and still lost money, but had been taken over - very cheaply - by Terence Gooding before I got there.

He later took over Leica Cameras and merged it with Cambridge Instruments. The company had 800 employees when I joined it and was down to 400 when they made me redundant with the rest of the electron beam tester team.

It\'s now part of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_Microsystems

The Cambridge unit was down to about 100 people when I last talked to them.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Michael Terrell]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 11:14:12 PM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 12:32:36 AM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
..
In your opinion. A real engineer would have posed it as a question, not condemn, out of hand. \'Why did you chose the oscillator module, instead of a crystal? You could have used a 32.768 KHz watch crystal in its place\' The entire design was from spare parts that were in the 50 drawer parts cabinets that covered the back of my workbench.

A \"protoptype\" is a typo.

Over 600 drawers of parts to build prototypes. Your crystal would have required a binary counter, when decade counters are more common.

Not in any l.ab I\'ve worked in.

Apparently you haven\'t worked in many labs.

> A \"protoptype\" is the first of series. If you were putting together a one-off kluge just to get the FAA off your neck, it wasn\'t a prototype.

It was a prototype that work, and ended up as a one off, since they decided they didn\'t need a spare.

> And the end result monitored the lamps current consumption, not the light coming out of them, which was was the FAA wanted pilots to be able to see.

Even you should realize that incandescent lamps don\'t draw power without emitting lights, and Xenon strobes don\'t draw power if the don\'t need to recharge after a flash. Also, that is why there are multiple lamps on each leg of a tower. With modern tower lights, the Xenon strobes have been replaced with high power LEDs, along with the sidelights. All of the commercial monitoring systems measured the current as well. The only difference was how they communicated. Today, they would be connected via the internet, which feed the programming from Master Control to the tower site. It just didn\'t exist at that time.

Once again, you can\'t admit that you\'re wrong.

There was no specification on the exact number of lumens. Just the number and the position of the lamps and the flash timing to identify each tower. These standards were set when Aviation started in the United States. Those towers were direction beacons and AM radio towers. The pilots flight charts listed the flash pattern for every tower in their path, and others along each side to help them stay on course. There were also books that listed every tower in a region, in case a pilot was blown way off coyrse in a storm. Tere was no RADAR or satellites back when the system was developed.

This was done for the early Air Mail service. It also utilized large concrete pads shaped like an arrow that pointed to the next airfield. They were common out in the western deserts where there were no roads to follow. This predated two way radios in airplanes.

Once again, you are totally clueless, but highly opinionated.

This attitude of yours is why no one here likes you.

Except the people who relied on the circuits I\'d designed.

I\'m pretty popular with them.

Obviously none of them are here to agree with you.

Only in your small, narrow mind. You are incapable of ever admitting to a mistake. Unlike you, I went for a robust design for a harsh environment. I\'ve rarely found a bad oscillator module, but I\'ve seen a lot of defective watch crystals. In fact, I save the modules from old computer motherboards, and can often find one on a frequency I need.

What attitude is that? Skepticism about your engineering skills?

Skepticism that you were ever an engineer, instead of a circuit hack. You would have been out the door in days, with your attitude.

> Was that a surface mount board? Reflow happens after pick and place - it\'s not the whole of PCB assembly by any means.

Pick and place us only cost effective on high volume, identical boards. We were an \'Engineer to Order\' operation Base models that were customized to each customer\'s needs. Most boards were built in bathes of 0, or less with dozens of variation in process at the same time. Deep Space Telemetry requires different features from a weapons system or for the control and operation of Weather Satellites. Hundreds of millions of people relied on our designs.

We had a new Heller reflow oven for the hand placed boards.

I built test fixtures, and prodded the programmers to simplify programing new boards, By working together, most of the programming was done by connecting to our in house servers, and booting the unit from an external floppy drive. It reduced the programing time from a full day, to about 20 minutes. What did you ever build that could be reconfigured thousands of miles away, or install new firmware? How many used 14 microprocessors? Have you ever worked with FIR ICs?

What\'s an FIR IC?

Quote: \"In signal processing, a finite impulse response (FIR) filter is a filter whose impulse response (or response to any finite length input) is of finite duration, because it settles to zero in finite time.\"

It replaced L/C RF and audio filters with digital processing via Decimation.. The walls wee vertical, they were programmable. Telemetry, lie RADAR and other microwave systems used 70 MHz IF systems, so the received signal could be fed directly to a special instrumentation recorder. In the RCB2000, wit digitized the incoming signals up to 90 Mhz. This allowed u to a 40 MHz wide IF system, if needed This was done with the firs set of FIR ICs. The second set was used to set the bandwidth for the video output Al controlled by software, and it cold be remote controlled as well. We took the output of the firs FIR stage and generated a 70 MHz output for logging. The receiver could also deal with Doppler shift , by trimming the internal 10 MHz reference by +/-150 Hz

I took that model from Engineering prototype, into full production. Unlike our previous Analog designs, special features were then just custom software . This eliminated the need for custom boards, per customer\'s requirements.. It even allowed you to use the built in monitor as a Spectrum display, if neded. That was the only optional module, since it was a complete subsystem.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Friday, July 21, 2023 at 2:21:34 PM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 11:14:12 PM UTC-4, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 12:32:36 AM UTC+10, Michael Terrell wrote:
.
In your opinion. A real engineer would have posed it as a question, not condemn, out of hand. \'Why did you chose the oscillator module, instead of a crystal? You could have used a 32.768 KHz watch crystal in its place\' The entire design was from spare parts that were in the 50 drawer parts cabinets that covered the back of my workbench.

A \"prototype\" is a typo.

Over 600 drawers of parts to build prototypes. Your crystal would have required a binary counter, when decade counters are more common.

Not in any l.ab I\'ve worked in.

Apparently you haven\'t worked in many labs.

Wrong.

A \"protoptype\" is the first of series. If you were putting together a one-off kluge just to get the FAA off your neck, it wasn\'t a prototype.

It was a prototype that work, and ended up as a one off, since they decided they didn\'t need a spare.

And the end result monitored the lamps current consumption, not the light coming out of them, which was was the FAA wanted pilots to be able to see.
Even you should realize that incandescent lamps don\'t draw power without emitting lights, and Xenon strobes don\'t draw power if the don\'t need to recharge after a flash.

Sadly, the circuits that provide power to these lamps can fail, and keep on drawing current even though they are delivering current to the lamp.

>Also, that is why there are multiple lamps on each leg of a tower. With modern tower lights, the Xenon strobes have been replaced with high power LEDs, along with the sidelights. All of the commercial monitoring systems measured the current as well. The only difference was how they communicated. Today, they would be connected via the internet, which feed the programming from Master Control to the tower site. It just didn\'t exist at that time.

They\'d be connected by a local area network. That wouldn\'t be connected to the internet which extends around the world to reach Russian hackers, amongst others.

As I\'ve pointed out, local area networks go back to 1971 twenty earlier than the internet.

> Once again, you can\'t admit that you\'re wrong.

Or you can\'t realise that you are.

> There was no specification on the exact number of lumens. Just the number and the position of the lamps and the flash timing to identify each tower. These standards were set when Aviation started in the United States. Those towers were direction beacons and AM radio towers. The pilots flight charts listed the flash pattern for every tower in their path, and others along each side to help them stay on course. There were also books that listed every tower in a region, in case a pilot was blown way off course in a storm. There was no RADAR or satellites back when the system was developed.

It\'s clearly derived from marine lighthouses, which go back even further.

This was done for the early Air Mail service. It also utilized large concrete pads shaped like an arrow that pointed to the next airfield. They were common out in the western deserts where there were no roads to follow. This predated two way radios in airplanes.

Once again, you are totally clueless, but highly opinionated.

Fits you better than me. Two way radio communication with aircraft dates back to 1911. It wasn\'t practical for mail planes with a single pilot and no other crew until quite a bit later.

https://www.aviationsurvival.com/The-History-of-Radio-in-Flight-Communications-_b_42.html

This attitude of yours is why no one here likes you.

Except the people who relied on the circuits I\'d designed.

I\'m pretty popular with them.

Obviously none of them are here to agree with you.

True. They\'ve got better things to to do than hang out with geriatric nut cases.

Only in your small, narrow mind. You are incapable of ever admitting to a mistake. Unlike you, I went for a robust design for a harsh environment. I\'ve rarely found a bad oscillator module, but I\'ve seen a lot of defective watch crystals. In fact, I save the modules from old computer motherboards, and can often find one on a frequency I need.

What attitude is that? Skepticism about your engineering skills?

Skepticism that you were ever an engineer, instead of a circuit hack. You would have been out the door in days, with your attitude.

But I lasted for years in almost every job I had - the one exception was where I resigned after five months, in the same week that four other people did. Management was the problem there, not my attitude.

Was that a surface mount board? Reflow happens after pick and place - it\'s not the whole of PCB assembly by any means.

Pick and place us only cost effective on high volume, identical boards. We were an \'Engineer to Order\' operation Base models that were customized to each customer\'s needs. Most boards were built in bathes of 0, or less with dozens of variation in process at the same time. Deep Space Telemetry requires different features from a weapons system or for the control and operation of Weather Satellites. Hundreds of millions of people relied on our designs.

So you went in for manual pick and place. Most of my boards did too. We weren\'t in a high volume business.

> We had a new Heller reflow oven for the hand placed boards.

<snip>

What\'s an FIR IC?

Quote: \"In signal processing, a finite impulse response (FIR) filter is a filter whose impulse response (or response to any finite length input) is of finite duration, because it settles to zero in finite time.\"

That was what I thought that you meant. And you\'ve snipped my comment saying so. You can use integrated circuits to build an FIR filter (and I\'ve done it ) - or build such a filter in to decent sized signal-processing chip which is more or less what you seem to have been doing, but even though this sort of chip is frequently used for FIR filtering, nobody who knew what they were talking about would call it an FIR chip.

<snipped Mike wittering on about stuff that he thought he understood>

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney