Don Lancaster: RIP

The jerk called himself Massive Prong, which I translated to Mini Thong and then later to Always Wrong.

I do know enough about it to know that your solution doesn't address the problem - as you admitted. You do need to monitor that every lamp is emitting light not just drawing current, and your solution didn't even warn you if one of the lamps wasn't drawing current.

A real engineer who had worked for your company, back when you did.

<snip>

Didn't we all?

Who knows. The commercial electronic firms I worked for didn't go in for that kind of stuff.

There were occasions where people found out that stuff needed fixing at the last minute and I did pitch in, but it didn't happen often - having the managing director hovering didn't help, but I knew him well enough to send him up when he got too anxious.

The rectified output from the current transformer was fed to a comparator, that gated thee 1024 Hz square wave, before it was filtered to a sine wave. The input had a ten turn potentiometer to set the trip level, so it did exactly what I said. No matter how you spin it, it worked as designed or the FCC's engineers would have made us replace it with a commercial system that required an expensive leased phone line. It would have been about $5,000 a year. because of the distance.

There had already been one TV broadcast tower destroyed when the wing of an airplane snapped the guy lines on one side. You have no idea how stringent they are, and the FAA is even worse. Your lack of insight and comprehension is obvious. Rather than ask questions for what you don't understand, you simply hand down your worthless decree, from on high. Just lake a bad Army Officer I had to deal with. He informed me that he not only didn't have to comply with the safety regulations at the TV station, but he tried to confiscate all of the equipment manuals. The issue was escalated well above his pay grade, and he was ordered to stay the hell out of the control/transmitter room and studio. The irony was it was the same Two Star General, who promoted me that handed his head to him. He was informed that his fit did indeed stink, and I had the authority to have him arrested for entering the off limits area.

He had over 100 stupid names to avoid filters. He, like Sloman spouted inane nonsense. Neither are capable of looking at a problem before declaring any solution to be useless. Sloman called the current monitor design Extravagant, and useless, without knowing anything about it. It was on abut six square inches of perf board, since there wasn't time to have a double sided board made. It worked on iniital power up and only required calibration. You know that feeling, especially when under a very short deadline. I had about 40 hours before I had to mail the reply to the FCC. I used all COTS components that I had on hand. and the station already had the 30A current transformer. I knew what I was going to need as soon as I read the letter, and verified that we had a spare audio channel between the sites. You've dealt with military and government projects, many times, so you know the intricacies. Th entire unit fit into a standard plastic electrical box, and as far as I know it was still working until the old transmitter site was sold to someone to build another independent TV station.

BTW, I thought of him as 'Ding Dong. ;-)

When did he disappear? I was off of here for many years, until Phil tracked me down.

<snipped Michael evading the point, at length.>

He did post stuff that right-wing lunatics like krw didn't want to hear, and tried to claim was inane.

I pointed out that dividing down a 1.024 MHz crystal oscillator output by 1000 to get 1024 Hz square wave was extravagant, when you could get the same waveform more cheaply by dividing down a 32,768 Hz watch crystal oscillator by 32.

I didn't say anything about useless, and you'd told us quite enough about that bit of the circuit to make it clear that that bit of it was extravagant.

You would.

He doesn't show up often these days.

In you opinion. A real engineer would have poised it as a question, not condemn, out of hand. 'Why did you chose the oscillator module, instead of a crystal? You could have used a 32.768 KHz watch crystal in its place' The entire design was from spare parts that were in the 50 drawer parts cabinets that covered the back of my workbench. Over 600 drawers of parts to build prototypes. Your crystal would have required a binary counter, when decade counters are more common. Buying ICs that would only be used in one prototype is extravagant. It was a one off, not a commercial product so shaving off a few pennies doesn't matter. What mattered was the end result. No design review, no months of planning, and no budget meetings. I've been through all that, along with ISO9001 implementation

This attitude of yours is why no one likes you.

Only in your small, narrow mind. You are incapable of ever admitting to a mistake. Unlike you, I went for a robust design for a harsh environment. I've rarely found a bad oscillator module, but I've seen a lot of defective watch crystals. In fact, I save the modules from old computer motherboards, and can often find one on a frequency I need. You sound like the Old Radio hacks who scream that every capacitor should be replaced, before repairing any electronics. One insisted that a HP3325A Function generator needed this. It would take most of them weeks to change all the caps. In reality, they would likely destroy the circuit boards.

You worked in a tiny world in the field of Electronics. I started to build things at 10 years old, and I was working in a shop at 13 to repair equipment. You are not a 'Team Player', and you can not accept anyone else's ideas. You never discuss, you mandate.

The best engineers that I've worked with started as hobbyists or Amateur Radio operators while they were still in school, not someone who drifted into the field later in life. I've seen several with your attitude get fired. I was asked several times why I didn't have an EE degree, but they understood the military school. Most of the engineers would accept my input, even though I was assigned to a different department. I was given special products for Engineering, from time to time. The last was to take a prototype $80,000 receiver system from a working prototype, into production. This included upgrading or in house PCB assembly, or reflow process. I built test fixtures, and prodded he programmers to simplify programing new boards, By working together, most of the programming was done by connecting to our in hose servers, and booting the unit from an external floppy drive. It reduced the programing time from a full day, to about 20 minutes. What did you ever build that could be reconfigured thousands of miles away, or install new firmware? How many used 14 microprocessors? Have you ever worked wit FIR ICs?

What kind of equipment did Cambridge make? It appears that there were several companies with that name, yet very little actual information about their products.

That wasn't made clear, though it was pretty obvious.

Not in any l.ab I've worked in.

A "protoptype" is the first of series. If you were putting together a one-off kluge just to get the FAA off your neck, it wasn't a prototype.

And the end result monitored the lamps current consumption, not the light coming out of them, which was was the FAA wanted pilots to be able to see.

Except the people who relied on the circuits I'd designed.

I'm pretty popular with them.

Not the attitude of somebody who designs stuff for production.

I'm a fan of "if it ain't broke" don't fix it. Electrolytic capacitors weren't well treated by some old-fashioned designers, but I would recommended replacing even them if there wasn't something obviously wrong with them

Bizarre misconception. You don't seem to be equipped to follow the discussions that have happened here, or you wouldn't have posted that downright lie. As for not being a "team player", I've been a constructive member of lots of teams - which has involved telling all of them that they have got stuff wrong. but not all that often.

Your idea of what constitutes a good engineer seems to be a bit odd.

What attitude is that? Skepticism about your engineering skills?

Was that a surface mount board? Reflow happens after pick and place - it's not the whole of PCB assemby by any means.

The electron beam microfabricators I worked on were spread around the western world - two ended up in Australia. The software was shipped internationally by e-mail from early on, long before there was an internet.

The original design was pretty old and predated microprocessors. There was a VAX build into the system somewhere, but I didn't get anywhere near it.

What's an FIR IC? I know about finite impulse filters and have used them from time to time but the ones I used would have been hard to integrate - I ended up trimming the taps on one of them to 0.1%, and while you could do that with a laser trimmer, it wouldn't have made sense in that application. Far Infra-Red imaging IC's exist, but they are exotic and expensive. Silicon won't hack it., and while I have worked with GaAs integrated circuits they weren't optical sensors

The company I world for was called Cambridge Instruments. It made electron microscopes. It was a mess.

The original company - Cambridge Scientific Instruments - was set up by Horace Darwin - Charles Darwin's youngest son - in 1881

It got big and eventually fell apart in the 1970's. The bit I joined in 1982 was the unprofitable rump that made electron microscopes that got left over after all the profitable bits had been sold off. It had got merged with another high tech company - Metals Research that made an image analysis machine and a GaAs single crystal pulling machine (both of which I worked on for a bit) and still lost money, but had been taken over - very cheaply - by Terence Gooding before I got there.

He later took over Leica Cameras and merged it with Cambridge Instruments. The company had 800 employees when I joined it and was down to 400 when they made me redundant with the rest of the electron beam tester team.

It's now part of

The Cambridge unit was down to about 100 people when I last talked to them.

A "protoptype" is a typo.

Apparently you haven't worked in many labs.

It was a prototype that work, and ended up as a one off, since they decided they didn't need a spare.

Even you should realize that incandescent lamps don't draw power without emitting lights, and Xenon strobes don't draw power if the don't need to recharge after a flash. Also, that is why there are multiple lamps on each leg of a tower. With modern tower lights, the Xenon strobes have been replaced with high power LEDs, along with the sidelights. All of the commercial monitoring systems measured the current as well. The only difference was how they communicated. Today, they would be connected via the internet, which feed the programming from Master Control to the tower site. It just didn't exist at that time.

Once again, you can't admit that you're wrong.

There was no specification on the exact number of lumens. Just the number and the position of the lamps and the flash timing to identify each tower. These standards were set when Aviation started in the United States. Those towers were direction beacons and AM radio towers. The pilots flight charts listed the flash pattern for every tower in their path, and others along each side to help them stay on course. There were also books that listed every tower in a region, in case a pilot was blown way off coyrse in a storm. Tere was no RADAR or satellites back when the system was developed.

This was done for the early Air Mail service. It also utilized large concrete pads shaped like an arrow that pointed to the next airfield. They were common out in the western deserts where there were no roads to follow. This predated two way radios in airplanes.

Once again, you are totally clueless, but highly opinionated.

Obviously none of them are here to agree with you.

Skepticism that you were ever an engineer, instead of a circuit hack. You would have been out the door in days, with your attitude.

Pick and place us only cost effective on high volume, identical boards. We were an 'Engineer to Order' operation Base models that were customized to each customer's needs. Most boards were built in bathes of 0, or less with dozens of variation in process at the same time. Deep Space Telemetry requires different features from a weapons system or for the control and operation of Weather Satellites. Hundreds of millions of people relied on our designs.

We had a new Heller reflow oven for the hand placed boards.

Quote: "In signal processing, a finite impulse response (FIR) filter is a filter whose impulse response (or response to any finite length input) is of finite duration, because it settles to zero in finite time."

It replaced L/C RF and audio filters with digital processing via Decimation. The walls wee vertical, they were programmable. Telemetry, lie RADAR and other microwave systems used 70 MHz IF systems, so the received signal could be fed directly to a special instrumentation recorder. In the RCB2000, wit digitized the incoming signals up to 90 Mhz. This allowed u to a 40 MHz wide IF system, if needed This was done with the firs set of FIR ICs. The second set was used to set the bandwidth for the video output Al controlled by software, and it cold be remote controlled as well. We took the output of the firs FIR stage and generated a 70 MHz output for logging. The receiver could also deal with Doppler shift , by trimming the internal 10 MHz reference by +/-150 Hz

I took that model from Engineering prototype, into full production. Unlike our previous Analog designs, special features were then just custom software . This eliminated the need for custom boards, per customer's requirements. It even allowed you to use the built in monitor as a Spectrum display, if neded. That was the only optional module, since it was a complete subsystem.

Wrong.

Sadly, the circuits that provide power to these lamps can fail, and keep on drawing current even though they are delivering current to the lamp.

They'd be connected by a local area network. That wouldn't be connected to the internet which extends around the world to reach Russian hackers, amongst others.

As I've pointed out, local area networks go back to 1971 twenty earlier than the internet.

Or you can't realise that you are.

It's clearly derived from marine lighthouses, which go back even further.

Fits you better than me. Two way radio communication with aircraft dates back to 1911. It wasn't practical for mail planes with a single pilot and no other crew until quite a bit later.

True. They've got better things to to do than hang out with geriatric nut cases.

But I lasted for years in almost every job I had - the one exception was where I resigned after five months, in the same week that four other people did. Management was the problem there, not my attitude.

So you went in for manual pick and place. Most of my boards did too. We weren't in a high volume business.

<snip>

That was what I thought that you meant. And you've snipped my comment saying so. You can use integrated circuits to build an FIR filter (and I've done it ) - or build such a filter in to decent sized signal-processing chip which is more or less what you seem to have been doing, but even though this sort of chip is frequently used for FIR filtering, nobody who knew what they were talking about would call it an FIR chip.

<snipped Mike wittering on about stuff that he thought he understood>