RadioBanter - View Single Post

February 28th 05, 09:34 PM

regurgitated the following on Sun, Feb 27 2005 7:35 pm
after a bad hoagie gave him indigestion:

Alun L. Palmer wrote:
wrote in news:1109527218.137133.13160

Mathcad . . ah, yes . . If you do any engineering math which gets
complicated in Excel you need Mathcad Alun. I've been using it for
about ten years and it's become absolutely indispensible. Maybe
only a
half hour after I first loaded and fired Mathcad up those ten
years
ago and started messing with it I was running rapid-fire
"what-if's" on
a double integral I'd dreamed up as an exercise. Very intuitive.
Otherwise I wouldn't be able to run it. Heh.

I'm a patent agent these days. I may write patent applications for
communications systems that have complex equations in them, but
that's
about as close as I get to having to solve mathematical problems,
except in
the hobby of course.

OK, you've explained that before but I forgot what you're doing to
earn
your daily bread. It's the guys developing the systems who need to
crunch the numbers, not thee. I've gone off on a couple career
tangents
over the years and got into the marketing and sales game and went for
several spells in which I seldom even needed a handheld calculator.
But
in the past 15 years I've been almost 100% back to the design and
build
end of the biz and much of it has involved some fairly serious
analytical work. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered with
Mathcad. Now that I'm semi-retired and just sniping a project here and
there I've acquired a whole collection of design tools like Mathcad,
CAD and some bits and pieces of structural design FEA I can really
focus on hobby sorts of things.

Tsk, tsk. Just a few short years ago Kellie was bitching and
moaning about "Computers" being "useless!" :-)

Agreed. I've been pecking at HF wire antenna modeling via Nec Win Plus
and am getting all sorts of two-decimal-place accuracy results which I
bloody well know from experience are probably at least 3-5% off one
way
or another. Back to the diagonal cutters & soldering gun . . as usual.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. If Kellie already "knows" the results are "off,"
why bother with those analysis programs?

What exactly is Kellie bitching about in "results?" VSWR?
Oh, excuse me, hams don't use VSWR...it is "SWR" in ham
terms. :-)

For this reason I'm actually not sure of the value of testing hams
on Smith
charts, but I felt pretty sure I had seen a question on them in the
pool?

Beats me, I haven't spent much time poking around the pools. I don't
see the point to testing for "Smith chart operations"any more than I
see the point to test questions on using sliderule log scales to
calculate decibles up/down.

Isn't MORSEMANSHIP the ONLY requisite skill needed to
be a "real" ham? :-)

Aren't "real" hams supposed to "work DX on HF with CW?" :-)

ARRL has ALL the plans/instructions/data on wire antennas for
"real" hams. Just follow instructions. No Russian/rocket-science
math needed!

Based on some of the absolutely idiotic
posts about antenna matching issues by duly licensed individuals I've
seen in other venues indicate to me that if nothing else more test
questions on transmission line theory and practice need to be "loaded"
into the QPs.

Tsk, tsk. Passing all the TESTS to become "duly qualified" means
all "know" all about everything in radio, doesn't it? :-)

Those that don't have amateur radio licenses can't possibly know
anything about radio, can they? :-)

Obviously not. Without passing any ham tests, they don't have
the "interest" or "dedication" nor do they show "committment to
the ham community!" Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk.... :-)