Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:59:01 -0800, Richard Clark
wrote:

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:01:35 -0800, Jeff Liebermann
wrote:

Do I spend the money, or do I seach for your secret horde of free
university publications on antenna design?

Surely you must realize that this is not about money (a convenient
foil in this troll topic), but about skill (what the troll lacks).

If I had money and the necessary skills, I wouldn't be asking dumb
questions in this newsgroup.

The cheesy inventions that we have been breathlessly advised of have
the commensurate value of the bandwidth they return in a simple Google
search. It takes very little effort to recognize the moldy
fluorescence surrounding those meager offerings.

Wrong. Techno-hype became somewhat of a hobby of mine. During the
dot.com boom of the late 1990's, I was deriving considerable income
from doing technical sanity checks on business plans and projects.
During this time, I accumulated a fair collection of patents and ideas
that are pure bogus, yet were successfully promoted at least to the
point of being funded by technically clueless investors. Many are
still around today. Considering extent of the problem, and the fair
number of bogus patents, I would suggest that it is NOT easy to
recognize technical quackery.

Sure it IS easy. Unfortunately, there are plenty enough people who have
Mad Skillz in the suspension of disbelief.

Looking at technical guano and judging it as such is not difficult.
There are ways that dilettantes or the intelligent uninformed can detect
the aroma of hi-tech manure.

In a field where I am mostly ignorant - finance -I called shenanigans
when I first heard of heard of the new breed of ATM's. I yelled fraud
when I heard of the sub prime loans, and shook my head in disbelief as
80 year old people took out 50 year mortgages that folded interest and
principle back into the loan. And yet while I knew the present economic
crisis was coming back around 2003, it seems a whole lot of people
couldn't see that. And I was told by enough of them that my "old school"
view of economics was surely evidence of my stupidity.

In science, economics and technology, the evidence is all there, the
fundamentals are still quite serviceable, and analysis is not
difficult. The problem is that people start out with a basic premise
such as "Owning a house is the American Dream", or "The old guard is
saying that all is already known about antennas", and then trying to fit
everything into *that* philosophical Iron Maiden.

So I can take a look at say Art's antenna, and draw the conclusion that
it is very likely an inductor on the end of a pole, and it will tend to
perform like an EH antenna, with the coax serving as the major radiator.
Contacts can certainly be made. I don't even condemn it out of hand, I
don't think it is anything new, and after looking at it, it just seemed
to be a lot more effort to build than I wanted to trouble myself with.

Yet I'm an uneducated dilettante dummy - most people out there are a lot
smarter than me, so how come they can't figure this out when I can?


`- 73 de Mike N3LI -