Likewise, time has always been money, whether a technician or corporate
level project manager.
I do agree that experience is the best teacher and in keeping advise
simple. Everyone has a different approach.
I disagree that having a good idea as what you are looking for is
speculation. It aids and speeds your search as long as it's not done
with tunnel vision.
I do agree that many devices have similar signatures
Most hams have an open mind and a thirst for knowledge, but most are
severely limited for equipment and money.
They have a severe handicap that requires innovation and help if it's
available. For many living in an isolated location hep is unlikely to
be available
One thing I noted was the more you learn in depth the more difficult it
become to put things into plain language the average person can understand.
IF and I emphasize the IF the person recognizes the RFI signature they
already have a head start. OTOH This is not the time to start learning
RFI signatures
I use a structured approach which I'm sure you do as well.
Engineering OTOH?
A degree gives us all the basic tools to learn to a job which varies
with almost every job. It does shorten the learning curve. Many of
today's graduates appear to think they know all they need to know to do
a job.
For many years, a part of my job was doing signal strength measurements
for one of the largest semiconductor plants in the world. Calibrated
their instruments traceable to National bureau of standards.
We had high power "stuff" from KHz to GHz and on into X-rays. As a
portion of my job I was the one expected to keep us clean and to keep
our instruments working in such an environment. Much of our measurements
were done in double walled screen rooms.
I knew the RFI signatures of almost everything on site, but that was a
more simple time.
A couple examples and we had both EEs and CEs:
Whether it was computers, or RF, it had to work and technicians often
had to straighten out what engineers did. Some of those fixes didn't
involve RFI, but ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. One was
a new Chromatograph measuring many streams. My job was threatened when I
told them it wasn't going to work. The engineering department had
designed it and it certainly was going to work. A half million dollar
installation and It failed after only 20 minutes.
It took me a couple weeks and roughly $160,000 in parts to fix it.
Others only took only a few minutes and a few dollars to save up to a
half million dollars, or millions over time.
Engineering couldn't figure out how to run more than 4 streams (valves)
because the integrator (computer) only had 4 lines out. They were Binary
Coded Decimal (BCD).
Yes, they knew what BCD was, but no "off the shelf" decoder could be
found. They were unwilling to look into building them even if it was
such a simple device.
I'll bet at least half the readers on this forum could figure out how to
decode a 4 line BCD into ten and build it. I built 2 working decoders
over night with Radio Shack Parts. I plugged them in the next morning
and they worked. We used that circuit many times after that in many
areas because it was reliable, quick to build, parts were easy to
obtain, and it was easy to understand.
Those simple little decoders saved us from purchasing a number of large,
expensive installations at a half million or more each.
I quit,(after 26 years) went to college and earned a BS in CS (that's
the science of computers, not programming although there is a lot of
that too) with one of my minors in Math. When I retired, I was a
corporate level computer systems project manager with teams of engineers
working for me.
Through the years, Ham Radio helped me in many situations whether as a
technician or all the way through project manager. Often it was
surprising when an idea would pop up and I realized it came, not from my
degree, (or many non aligned courses) but rather from Ham Radio. That
BCD decoder was one. Many times Ham Radio provided circuits or simple
approaches to problems that had appeared to require very expensive
solutions. That's one of the reasons I miss the in depth basic
electronics required in the license tests, yet that, like the CW
requirement, was limiting the numbers our service needed to remain viable.
I'll only mention the drop in quality of the "average" new hires
compared to previous generations.
Being raised on a farm helped too. You learn there are many ways of
saving both work and money while your finger nails were never clean <:-)
73
Roger (K8RI)
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