I have a question, of course I cannot compel you to answer it but you defin itely won't if someone doesn't ask.
Where do you get this education ? Don't gimme this "I graduated in 19XX" sh it, you are on top of near cutting edge tech here. None of this shit existe d probably the last time you graduated anything.
Is it independent research ? Little courses or seminars from your clients ?
And on communications, damn. You are on a different planet than me. I know what a yagi antenna is but not how it works. I got a technical paper on the phased arrays in cell towers and believe it or not I understand the princi ple. But you could probably program it, where do you get that knowledge ?
Well, when you learn to spell my name correctly, I might be a bit less abrasive.
I used to have my resume on LinkedIn, but now I can't find it. Argh... it looks and smells like Facebook.
Actually, I'm very much behind the times in many areas. I mostly gave up on working in RF in about 1983. I switched to computer repair, which I thought was more interesting and less demanding. I continued to do RF design up to about 2010. However, all the work was doing damage control on someone else's mess, to filling in when someone bailed out in the middle of a project. As of the end of the month, I'll be retired (I'm 72) and out of the computer consulting biz. I'm shutting down the office, and moving all the junk home. After 30 years, it hurts, especially when I recycled as eWaste a dumpster full of computers and PCBs. I'm not sure what I'll be doing next month. I hate to admit it but technology is my life. Somewhere along the line, I forgot to get married and have deductions.
So, you're wondering how I managed to learn all this stuff. Same as most people. I read, I watch YouTube videos, I try to understand, I build things, I repair far too many things, I design a few things, and so on. Learn by Doing was the college motto. It takes a lifetime of doing to get to where you think I'm at so don't expect instant enlightenment. I've also taught classes, answered far to many tech questions on Usenet, gotten involved in virtual companies, and done some management. In other words, I haven't done just one thing that made me so cutting edge. I tried many things, understood how they related to each other, failed at some, did well at others, and made some money doing it.
If want to do the same, I suggest you concentrate on learning how things work. Once you learn that, you can fix or design anything. Incidentally, by work, I mean how anything works, including politics, banking, automobiles, computers, investors, and other things you're likely to encounter.
I've never taken a formal class in anything beyond what I took in college and teacher preparation. I sometimes attended seminars to meet the people doing the work, not to hear the talk. I tried to attend trade shows, user groups meetings, and a few too many parties, again to meet the people involved, and not so much to learn anything technical. For tech, it was a mixture of "Learn by Destroying", reading, getting my hands dirty, more reading, etc. Instead of hearing lectures, I give them. I learn far more by researching a topic and explaining it to a room full of sharks ready to pounce on any mistake I might make, than I do from being spoon fed the same information by a speaker where English is their 3rd language.
Hardly. I just have had more time to absorb the subject and work with it. There are many areas in communications where I'm severely lacking. However, I am willing and able to fill in those holes when needed.
Read, think, build, fail, and then ask.
Good. Then hang around the RF related newsgroups and forums and try to ANSWER someone's questions about phased arrays and cell tower antennas. While writing your reply, you'll probably discover that there's something lacking in your explanation, which will send you off to Google to search of the missing parts of the puzzle. When your explanation is posted, you will likely be attacked by someone who found a mistake, disagrees with your explanation, or has a better explanation. You will then worry that your reputation is now ruined, and that nobody will ever believe anything that you have written or will write. Fine. Admit your mistake, post a correction, thank the person who found your mistake, and add something of value to the discussion. With that, you've redeemed your reputation and probably learned something you'll never forget. Above all, never post or write anything that you would not consider worth reading.
Well, I certainly didn't learn antennas overnight. It does take time. As for antenna knowledge, I've built a few antennas over the years, which taught me quite a bit about the characteristics of some antennas. I've also done some antenna modeling (and reverse engineering), mostly with 4NEC2:
Good luck.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
My education trained me to use my brain. Taught me how and why science worked. Taught me how components and electricity worked. Then working at a research institute kept all that fresh and useful. And was fun.
Mostly true and only if I could fix it after destroying it.
I attended college at Cal Poly, Pomona. The skool motto was "Learn by Doing". Minimal lectures and maximum labs. I didn't just read about what I was learning. I had to work with it and demonstrate some proficiency. Not exactly a college for engineers dabbling exclusively in theory. I probably learned more helping build various Rose Floats than I did from class work.
The standard joke was to modify the skool motto to "Learn by Destroying". As I blundered my way through various jobs and businesses, I realized how true that was. One really must tear something apart, probe around the insides, deduce how it works, and occasionally find some design mistakes. Only after you have broken something, and then fixed it, can one truly say they understand how it works. When it came time to select a suitable domain name, LearnByDestroying.com was my 2nd choice.
Since then, I've made it a point of tearing things apart and looking inside. Sometimes, I do that before checking to see if it worked. I rarely read the instructions as it's much more fun to figure things out for myself. There's nothing more frustrating to me than a device that is designed to discourage inspection and repair. When doing a design, I often inspect and reverse engineer the competitors products to see what they had done. Sometimes, I get useful insights. More recently, I'm finding disgusting junk, marginal design, and pointless cost cutting. Whatever I find, I learn from the mistakes of others. I try not to destroy anything, but sometimes, destructive testing is a necessary and useful evil on the road to understanding.
Note that this doesn't just apply to electronic devices. I use the same methods in mechanical devices, chemistry, adhesives, lubricants, household products, automobile repair, and construction. If I know how it works, I can fix it, build it, and possibly design something better. If something needs to be destroyed along the bumpy road to knowledge, that's the price I pay.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I've thought about that, but not for the reasons you mention. My latest problem is that the local water district wants to build a
125,000 gallon water tank in the middle of my neighborhood. They plan to take a year building it, blocking access to the neighborhood during working hours for most of this time. So, I take off my engineer hat, put on my politician hat, and do battle with the real estate speculators who want to make their unbuildable properties buildable by providing municipal water.
Incidentally, there are many reasons that I'm retiring. The big one is that the area around my office has become somewhat of a homeless encampment. When I discovered that customers and friends were reluctant to visit my office to pickup and drop off their machines, I decided it was time to bail out. That was about years ago. A kidney stone operation and Covid-19 delayed my departure until now.
1200 sq-ft. After deducting walk ways, bathroom kitchen, pantry, wood burner, closets, and other areas that can't be used for storage, I'm left with about 500 sq-ft that can be used for storage. The office was 800 sq-ft, most of which was "inventory". As you might suspect, there's not enough room at the house (no garage), so about 1/4th of the junk is in boxes piled up outside on various decks. The plan is to move out first to save money on the rent, and then do triage on the remaining junk, reducing it to a manageable pile before it starts raining.
I've already given notice and should be out by the end of the month. I'm about 90% done with the move, leaving only some furniture, piles of papers, some parts, cables, cleaning supplies, etc.
Yeah, something like that. Some people learn best from lectures. Others do best by reading about from a book. I learn best when I get my hands dirty. The best part of that is nobody will pay me to listen to lectures or read books, but will pay nicely to get my hands dirty.
It's part of progress. Things are happening today faster and faster than they did when I was in skool. 50 years ago, I was allowed only 2 weeks to work out a suitable initial design, followed by 3 months before the first articles were scheduled to be shipped. At the time, I thought this was a horribly fast pace. More recently, I've been helping clean up projects that were designed over a weekend, modeled in LTSpice in a week, PCB designed with KiCad in another week, package designed in SolidWorks in parallel with the PCB, and ready for shipping in 3 weeks, during which time the first boards were tested. End to end, that was about 6 weeks, without ever building a prototype. Going from 14 weeks to 6 weeks is very much "instant" to someone used to a slower pace (like me). That bad news is that makes me obsolete by today's standards.
So, what does knowing what happens in the news do for you? Will it make money for you, perhaps in investments? Do you use it to predict spending trends? When I look at politics on any level from global politics to office politics, I always ask a simple question. What problem are they trying to solve? If you can answer that simple question, the rest of the picture becomes much clearer.
Mostly wrong.
You do not understand the theory of operation. When you are able to discuss tradeoffs between occupied bandwidth, BER, SNR, OFDM, MIMO, LTE, various modulation schemes, channel loading, interference, fading, propagation, compression, MOS, error correction, etc, I'll believe you understand the theory of operation. Knowing how a phased antenna array works is like saying you understand how a stereo receiver works because you understand how a capacitor functions. There's much more to the puzzle than knowing about one small piece.
10ft (3m) accuracy is possible, but not by direction finding. Direction finding by any method is subject to difficulties due to interference, multipath reflections, and reference accuracy. The way most of these and other problems are minimized is to produce a large number of lines of position on a map while moving. Some of the lines point to false reflections. Others are from interference. Eventually, you get enough lines that they start to intersect at one point on the map. The transmitter is located somewhere within the blob of lines, which will probably be much wider than 3m.
Huge amounts of effort have gone into power reduction at both the handset and the tower. Read about APC (adaptive power control) and ET (envelope tracking) on cell phones and base station transmitters.
I mind very much being told that I'm wrong. I used to sulk for days after getting caught making a stupid mistake. Like falling off a horse, I get back on and try to ride again. It took me literally years to get used to the idea that it was acceptable to screw up.
Gotta run now or I'll be late...
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I think you would like having a look at my bench receiver. Been in a fire a nd a flood. I got a jew joke but I can word it out of it...
Two guys in Florida are talking, one says "My business burnt to the ground, I am getting old and the insurance was enough so I decided to just retire" . "Almost the same here, I gto flooded out and said screw it, I have enough money". The first guy says "How do you start a flood ?".
Yeah the bench receive, Pioneer SX-850. Has what I need, pre out main in an d all that. Preamp section has some sort of leakage on the board or somethi ng and I had to throw in some like 100K resistors to get it to work. The po wer amp burned up one of the bias pots so that is jumped out. The regulator board is broken in four places and jumpered back together. I had to put ou tputs in it, I used 2SD425 and 2SB555 I think. And there are two pairs per channel in this 65 watts amp. It is definitely not scared of four ohms. AND IT SOUNDS GREAT ! I can't hear any crossover distortion, though in speaker s I usually listen loud.
You do know how to bias an amp right ? In lack of any information find the output (collector) of the main voltage amp, put a scope on it and drive it
t is the threshold, you can go beyond that at will, but it has to at least be to that point.
One thing, when it comes to chemistry learning by destroying might not be a ll it's cracked up to be. You can have some really dastardly accidents with that shit.
So you are in your seventies ans I am to become a sexagenarian on the 18th of this month. That means we both remember how it was. We remember search w arrants for example. ut we also remember chemistry sets. Remember those ? I do and if there are any around I bet they don't have much in them. "Oh thi s is poisonous". So you are giving a chemistry set to a kid you figure does n't know not to drink the shit ? The Parents are dumber than the kid.
We have seen decades of change and I have concluded the following;
They word has gotten better but people have gotten worse.
Oh, be nice. As the default scapegoat and target for everything from bad jokes to genocide, we've learned to deal with the problem. After a few failed revolts, failed assimilations, failed passive resistance, and fails at writing our own jokes, we finally found a solution that works. We just buy everything in sight. At this time, we own Hollywood, banking, music industry, garment business, congressional lobbyists, and have a monopoly on Nobel Prizes. I'm not worried. Jeff #3 will change his tune when he needs something.
That's either the result of speech to text for non-typists, or the worlds worst spelling chequer.
Like I suggested, be nice. You can still be evil even if you are nice.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
List of Jewish last names. I'm on Page 18: I couldn't find Jeff #2 last name on the list, so he must not be Jewish.
For what it's worth, I prefer very dry, deadpan, non-emotional humor. I've written some humor, but I don't think you will like it. No need to reply. I get tired of too much praise and adulation.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
On Monday, August 10, 2020 at 5:59:14 PM UTC-4, Jeff Liebermann wrote: After
I don't mind that at all, but I've always been a bit resentful that my Jewish friends not only cut me out of the plan, but categorically deny all of this.
Now that I've got a Jewish daughter-in-law, I'm more aggravated being on the outside looking in. She says it's turnabout because I've never cut her in to the Mafia riches we EyeTalians enjoy.
I wrote that 24 years ago. I haven't really re-read the story, until today. All I see are spelling errors, things I left out, and some awful Hebrew to English transliteration. Over the years, various readers have suggested changes, offered additions, and translated it into Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish. In its day (1997), it was something rather unique for Usenet. Today, with the addition of a far better writers to the internet, it's rather mediocre and commonplace. Oh well.
More of my comments on Usenet:
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
PO Box 272 http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Ben Lomond CA 95005-0272
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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