One Up on Silicon Valley

 When I was interested in investing I read a book by Peter Lynch (the former manager of the Fidelity Magellan mutual fund) called "One up on Wall Street"

  The idea was that people know stuff from their everyday lives that may serve them well when investing.  And that individual investors are free to act on this knowledge where institutional investors either won't or can't make the same investments.

I think something similar could be said for electronics / ham radio.  An experimenter has the time and insight to apply ideas to his projects that just wouldn't be practical or tolerable in industry (in other words, too expensive).

I remember when I was starting out as an engineer, being in a quick, stand-up conversation between myself (an IC test engineer in Receiving Inspection), the QA supervisor and some design and production engineers.  They had a problem circuit that would only work with certain IC chips - they wanted me to test the ICs and sort them for this one parameter.  I said there was no problem technically.

But the QA supervisor put the kibosh on the whole idea.  

"We don't sort parts"  

The concept was to get the manufacturer to sort for the parameter and then specify that sorted part for our purchasing department to buy.  Or maybe just go back and fix the circuit so it would work with the spectrum of parts we had.

I don't remember exactly what happened but I know the design was "fixed" by some other method than sorting ICs :)

But sorting is a "no problem" kind of thing for experimenters.  Think of sorting the crystals for a crystal filter.  That's not too big a deal for a single radio.  Maybe not even for 100 or 1000 radios.  But a real manufacturer would probably just buy crystal filters or specify a tight tolerance to the crystal vendor.  Or as has now happened with a lot of ham radios, dispense with the crystal filtering and just use direct conversion or direct sampling to implement a DSP approach to selectivity.

Users hate menus.  Manufacturers use them to save on building out controls and switches that would be expensive and take a lot of space and which possibly may never be used.  An experimenter can just add switches or controls on the front panel of a radio and dispense with a menu item.   That's not quite as simple for a manufacturer to add a control but it's easy to add another menu item via a software update.

Time to find 20 crystals and start building a filter, why  20 ?  Why not ?  :)


Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm