Pinging 74HC4046 Users

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A flattering misconception. Sci.electronics.design is unusually active as user gropus go, but it's scarcely the whole world.

ng,

Precisely. You are sacrificing potential long terms benenfits - very potential in this case, granting your limited capacity to exploit skills that might exceed your own - in favour of short term gratification.

Cool it, Chester! I was the BOSS! ...Jim Thompson

He has a serious mean streak. And he has a much better memory for his "pranks" that he has for, say, physics or thermo.

Personally, I detest sneaking practical jokers and gloating get-even creeps. Cowards, both.

If I'd found you fiddling with someone else's work, undocumented, there would have been fireworks. I know you think it's just a joke, but it ain't.

RL

One of my happier memories of working at EMI Central Research is of having been intransigent enough that C.A.G. LeMay rejected me as his project engineer for a particularly ill-conceived project.

One of his nastier habits was to settle down with the hardware after work and fiddle with it, without documenting what he was doing. The guy who got stuck with job I managed to evade had to get his engineers together every morning and go through the hardware to find out what C.A.G. LeMay had done and either correct it or document it. They didn't always find everything.

It didn't matter in the long run - it was always a very silly idea - but it did waste a lot of time.

Not hiring you has enduring benefits.

Seriously, you'd be poison here, or to most productive engineering groups. You seem to have no genuine curiosity about electronics, no creativity or humor (they go together), and you have the people skills of a wolverine on a bad day.

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Strange idea. I've been a member of a couple of productive engineering groups, and I've remained in contact with the one at EMI Central Research (1976-79) ever since. I'm even linked to some of them on LinkedIn.

A bizarre misconception. Even you should have enoguh sense to deduce that this ins't true just from my posting patterns here - I don't spend all my time (or even a substantial part of it) correcting your misconceptions, though you are probably too emotionally involved to credit this.

The patents do suggest that I do have some capacity for creative thinking, and if you don't get my jokes your own sense of humour may be the one at fault.

It's a while since I posted a joke that I really liked - like the one in the thread "Op amp for division" back on April 11 1997 when I claimed that

"It is with a certain measure of schadenfreude that we in Nijmegen note that Harvard's semi-automatous expert help system "Winfield Hill" based on Paul Horowitz's electronics textbook "The Art of Electronics" has failed its extended Turing test."

but I do post intentionally comic stuff from time to time.

A claim that would surprise a large number of people that I know. Nobody has ever accused me of being good at flattery, which would seem to be the only people skill that you actually value, but there's a long gap between being direct and acting like a wolverine.

You would seem to be a perfect example of the kind of personnel department which has absolute faith in their less-than-reliable judgement.

wrong,

Little of which saw production. Engineering that doesn't result in products is a waste of time and money.

and I've remained in contact with the one at EMI Central

LinkedIn is not productive.

When I suggest things you might explore, you claim to be bored, or demand to be paid to investigate.

That's the funniest you've been in 15 years?

Or at getting people to hire you.

which would seem

I'm not a personnel department. My company doesn't even have one. And I've hired lots of duds that looked pretty good at first. The trick is to get rid of them if they turn out to be duds. Most of the good hires here have been by informal contacts or by accident, not the advertise-resume-interview routine, which usually doesn't work well. I met my best engineer here on s.e.d. Our embedded programmer guy was the lab partner of someone we knew who was in school. My business manager is a lady I used to work on ships with, maintaining automation systems, when I first came to California. My IT guy is the son of a friend of my wife.

Luckily, California is a work-at-will state. We can lay off anyone at any time for any reason, as they can quit any time they feel like it. So if we don't have a mutually beneficial relationship, it ends.

I didn't know what deadband refered to. Now I do, so the answer is I don't know. I take it Treadway's 9-gate wonder did not? How can you ever know without considering the output driver and filter characteristics?

My circuit is not 3-state, but at the time you asked for just an edge-triggered set-reset flip flop. Since it's never hi-Z even when locked I don't understand how it can have deadband. More jitter maybe since it over-corrects, but not deadband. I hope you can clarify that for me.

The deadband occurs where the phase difference is small enough that the PD2 output pulse width is less than t_PHL + t_PLH. The output pulse becomes a runt, and the phase detector gain K_phi drops to zero at zero phase difference.

The competing approach, used e.g. by Motorola back in the day, uses two separate outputs and subtracts them in analogue. That still has nonlinearity, but (a) K_phi only drops by a factor of 2 when one of the two pulses disappears, and, even more important, (b) the loop isn't trying to make the PD sit right on the flat spot, the way it is in the 4046.

Unlike the HC4046's VCO, PD2 is easy to fix--you just put a resistor to ground to pull it slightly off the flat spot. A few nanoseconds' worth is enough.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Perhaps. But I didn't get to chose which projects got funded - your criticism is of U.K. engineering management, which wasn't all that good, rather than of my competence as an engineer.

Sure. Whoever said it was? Apart from From LinkedIn, who want to make money out of it ...

I'm going to do stuff for you for free? I may be curious, but I'm not gullible.

as

That's the one that sticks in my mind - perhaps because Winfield Hill did find it funny. I'm not going to do a web search for additional examples - that would be taking you much too seriously.

I did pretty well from 1969 to 1991. After I'd turned 49 there were actual gaps between jobs - I'd become experienced and relatively expensive. People skills generally improve with age, so you've got to be hypothesising that I metamorphosed into a wolverine in my late forties, which is implausible, even for you. In fact at that point I'd become the social glue that held the Cambrdige Instruments electron beam tester project together, which was unexpected, and used up half a day a week that I'd have preferred to devote to circuit design and debugging.

But you do the selection and hiring, so you are the Highland Electronics personnel department, as well as filling a number of other functions. A jack of all trades, though you seem to have mastered electronics, if not perhaps to the level of becoming a living national treasure.

You left out the "take up references" and/or talk to previous employers part of the advertise-resume-inteview procedure. In the last decade of my time in the UK I used to get a few phone calls a year asking about people who had mentioned working with me to prospective employers.

Which is to say you really haven't mastered the advertise/read resume/ interview routine which allows you to access a rather bigger pool of candidates.

So your limited skills in personnel selection aren't actually lethal.

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The NXP 9046 uses a different solution again - current sources rather than logic levels

The VCO is still nasty, but PC2 is well-behaved.

Yup, it's better, but it just saves you a single resistor and costs at least a buck more. The 4046 PD2's flat spot is a minor wart if you know about it, but it can be a real puzzler otherwise--superficially the loop looks well-behaved, but it hunts back and forth by a few nanoseconds.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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1. I didn't suggest that you do things that I need. I suggested that you do things that might help *you* find useful something to do, maybe even find work.
2. If you want someone to hire you, as a consultant or as an employer, it's really good if you convince them that you are willing to work in their interest. Learning their application and science, or offering a freebie to start, is very good business. Sounding greedy and arrogant and bored isn't.

Hey, it's your life; live it your way.

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So you claim.

Very altruistic of you. Your grasp of the demands of the Dutch (and now the Australia) job market for engineers may be better than mine, since all I know about that subject is what I read in the local job ads, but none of your suggestions has looked all that useful to me.

For them. Less so for me. I might do it if I knew a fair bit about the people involved, and had good reason to think them honest, but I've got better things to do with my time than jumping through hoops in the vague hope of beong considered for a particular job. Not all that much better, perhaps, but still better than that.

Any more that sounding vain, petulant, and self-obsessed makes one look attractive as an employer.

Wanting to get paid for doing a specific task isn't exactly greedy - nobody values stuff they get for nothing, and people who don't have to pay for work tend to be frivolous about expanding the scope of the task. I'm certainly bored by a lot of the discussion that goes on here

- a lot of it is old errors being recycled by people who can't get their heads around the fact that they might be wrong - and pointing this out does make me sound arrogant. It's problem that all competent people have to live with. I'd have thought that you might have run into it from time to time, if you real-world competence came anywhere near your self-image.

Such a generous concession.