RadioBanter - View Single Post

November 22nd 04, 01:30 PM

In article ,
(Brian Kelly) writes:

(N2EY) wrote in message
...
In article ,

(Brian Kelly) writes:

What courses, exactly James, did you have in your freshman year in
E-school which taught/preached how to do a "rigorous analysis of all
facets of the problem at hand . . . a list of problems impeding the
design goal is developed, and solutions are proposed for each until
all have been . . " and come out of it with working pile of
hardware?

Ya missed the point.

Unless you can cite your soup-to-nuts "engineered" pile of freshman
hardware I didn't miss the point.

Boilerplate verbiage like:

"In engineering, this requires a rigorous analysis of all facets of the
problem
at hand - a list of problems impeding the design goal is developed, and
solutions are proposed for each until all have been satisfactorily
resolved"

is the ES 101 stuff. Actually doing it is very different. For example -
just what *are* all the facets of a given problem?.

I have no idea what "ES 101" is or was.

One of those intro engineering courses. Lays out basic concepts and methods.

. . . as if . . maybe two-three years outta E-school you were allowed
to take a poke at an assignment like that.

More like a year.

Sometimes right out of the chute, sometimes never and perhaps with a
glaring exception or two never in a freshman year out in commercial
reality.

Plus there's a big difference between giving the kid a project to do (every
aspect of which will be checked by someone more experienced) and really being
in charge of something.

. . Because that's what we get paid to do. Perhaps wrongly, more
likely not, we don't have a helluva lotta time for approaching
projects like ballooning to 100,000 feet with science fair project
mentalities. Interpret as you will.

The trick is that the volunteer folks don't have the paycheck incentive.
Just
the reverse - such a project costs them money! So the motivation has to be
elsewhere.

You're taking it off onto a couple irrelevent tangents.

No, completely relevant.

There isn't much real "engineering" in the hard numeric design sense attached
to doing what KB3EIA proposes. It's like adding a room onto a house - you
wouldn't do a complete stress analysis of every stud and joist, nor a fluid
dynamic analysis of the plumbing just so you could have a half-bath on the
ground floor.

The topic is
how various folk who come from different educational, training and
employment backgrounds approach the technical aspects of pulling off
non-commercial stunts like sending homebrewed electronics packages to
100,000 feet with a balloon.

OK.

Seasoned technical types degreed and
otherwise learn out in the college of hard knocks how to plan and
execute projects in highly systematic manners because when money is
involved the project better be pulled off properly or yer outta work.

Which is not the same factor here.

In business if ya signed the contract to deliver X on date Y, you better do it
or bad things will happen. In this balloon thing, a delay of weeks or months is
no big deal if the result is success rather than failure.

That's the incentive. Beyond that we is what we is and we don't change
our stripes when we get involved in the planning of off-hours
volunteer efforts or our hobbies.

Maybe *you* don't.

Wherein come the clashes with the
non-technical types we get involved with on joint efforts. Pick any
mid-to-large scale Field Day planning session around here for a
perfect example.

You might wanna look up how the CP folks did...

My main job in this whole project has been to SELL people on the
concept of something that is not particularly new, but has been made
more interesting by a fusion of Ham radio, GPS, Packet radio, and
Schools, or perhaps more accurately, youth in general.

I **TODJA** to stick to being the cheerleader and delegate the tech
stuff to the technoids dammit but NO, you got all ****y huffy about it
instead!

****y huffy is par for the course here, isn't it?

. . . yeah . . . which of course is the whole bottom bottom line . .

sigh

bwaahaahaa

Leo is VE, a VE6 if I'm not mistaken.

How does anyone know for sure? He's been anonymous since day one here.

He let his cat out of the bag at some point in past but it got past
you. He's a VE but I had him in the wrong province.

Didn't get past me. Leo sez he's a VE3. But no call, no last name, no positive
ID, no website, no outside confirmation. Maybe he is, maybe he ain't.

Not that there's anyhting wrong with that!

He could just as easily be another of Len's online personalities.

No way, changing writing styles like changing fingerprints, can't be
done.

Nonsense. Ghostwriters do it all the time. Len's done the pseudonym thing here
more than once - that we know of.

Leo absolutely is not Sweetums. Or vice versa.

Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not losing any sleep over it.

73 de Jim, N2EY