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Re: [RFI] Solar Panel RFI Awareness At Dayton

To: rfi@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [RFI] Solar Panel RFI Awareness At Dayton
From: Jim Brown <jim@audiosystemsgroup.com>
Reply-to: jim@audiosystemsgroup.com
Date: Wed, 25 May 2022 01:03:45 -0700
List-post: <mailto:rfi@contesting.com>
On 5/24/2022 9:51 PM, Tony wrote:
There is of course, some reasonable level of RFI that can not be corrected if the system is next door to you

That does seem logical Dave.

It does NOT seem reasonable to me. The engineering principles needed to do it right are well known, and have been since I graduated as an EE in 1964. One major problem is that some of us, including me, had to re-learn them 30 years later; another is that, thanks to the Balkanization of the teaching of EE in multiple specialties, the education of those specializing in digital systems didn't include many of those fundamentals, or they were "not important" in the context of their applications. For example, the analog I/O of the K3 is a train wreck because the digital guy designed it.

Here's an example of engineers with a very broad EE technical background get the big picture. In 2004, I took a 3-day seminar from EMC guru Henry Ott, retired from AT&T Bell Labs, the premier engineering entity on the planet for most of the 20th century. One of MANY jewels that were almost "asides" was that multilayer circuit boards that included "ground" layers above and/or below a circuit trace formed a transmission line, which confined fields from current on those traces to a VERY narrow region in the insulation between those traces, AND, here's the Jewell -- that the time it takes the signal to traverse that transmission line on practical board layouts places a fundamental limit on how fast these systems can run!

In the context of this discussion, Henry recommended two EE books by Johnson and Graham, which he described as fundamentally transmission lines books, that addressed these concepts in the context of traces on circuit boards. The seminar was in Palo Alto, and on the way to a restaurant after dinner, several of us stopped at the Stanford engineering bookstore, where I bought both books.

Henry worked as a consultant to many major corporations, including the giants of Si Valley, which gave him a great perspective, and caused him to think about technical things in the context of everything from physical implementation to cost to ongoing development of microprocessors to all sorts of applications, as well as fundamental limitations noted above. In that workshop were engineers working in a dozen or so specialties, and Henry's answers to their questions made it obvious to me that he had thought these questions through in ALL of those contexts, and many more.

Systems engineering and design in today's world requires expertise in MANY areas, and few of us can learn everything we need to solve any given problem that includes many of these disciplines. In my professional life, I was regularly a part of design teams with nearly a dozen different engineering disciplines, each of us addressing our own areas of expertise, and working interactively with those working in other disciplines so that all the bases were covered.

In that process, we asked a lot of "what if?" questions. What if in that Fukushima nuclear power plant, a tidal wave flooded the generators, which were in the basement, protecting the reactors? What if there's someone next door who cares about the emissions of the system I'm designing?

73, Jim K9YC


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