> I just had visions of a guy buying a television set, hauling it home,
> taking it apart and running endless tests to see if it does as
> Consumer Reports said it does. Or buying a car and setting it up to
> test its horsepower, compression ratio, etc. There is nothing wrong
> with doing these things -- it's just sorta amusing for me to think of
> it.
The real problem is we don't have a consumer reports to look at! We
only have QST, and they sure aren't nearly as thorough.
The automotive equivalent of the modern rig problems we are
discussing are not compression and horsepower. They are more like
having a car that occupies a large part of the lane next to it when
driving down the highway on a calm day, leaks oil on other people's
sidewalks, and gets blown off the road whenever a large truck goes
by.
Or for a television set, it would be a TV that receives the adjacent
channels and whose local oscillator screws up the rest of the TV sets
in the neighborhood.
Like George, I don't want to bother other people operating on
different frequencies when I transmit through any fault of my own
equipment, and I don't want to be bothered by others when they are a
few kHz away from the weak signals I am listening to no matter whose
fault it is.
If I ran 100 watts, had small antennas, lived in an urban location,
and mostly operated phone near other strong signals, I'd probably
care less about actual performance. I'd probably pick my rig by
looking at paint color and the choice of 10,000 selectable
filters!73, Tom W8JI
W8JI@contesting.com
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