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From: The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: uk.d-i-y,sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2024 14:31:07 +0100
Organization: A little, after lunch
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On 07/07/2024 14:06, john larkin wrote:
> We agree that scientists present us with wonderful problems to
> instrument but are generally terrible at designing electronics
> themselves.

This supposed dichotomy between academic and pragmatic knowledge is false.
Both are necessary
Example 1.
=======
We were developing a laser rangefinder for the Army, featuring fragile 
optics a ruby laser and a bloody expensive silicon photodiode.
Try as we might we couldnt get  more than just over a mile range from 
the lab roof to a white painted building about a mile away.
One day a boffin with a tweed jacket and pipe came visiting, we 
explained our problem.
"How much power is the laser?"
"EWhat is te noise figure on the photodiode"?
"I'll see whats what over lunch"


He came back later and sid - "Oh, well its not good news I am afraid, 
with that much power and that much front end noise you will  be lucky to 
get a mile put of that with a nice reflective target"
So we gave up, drained all the money out that projects budget and 
cancelled it.

Example 2
======

I was tasked with designing amongst other things a FM Hifi receiver. To 
save time we imported a Japanese tuner head and I built the  IF strip 
and detector.
The customer was however German, and totally chauvinistic. No Japanese 
quality. We must have German  or at least European, So we got a Philips 
head.
At once we had massive hiss and hum.  I didn't have time to track it 
diown so a consultant was briught on who spent a fortnight calculating 
the noise contribution of my IF strop and said 'well it doesn't seem to 
be that'
'I could have saved to two weeks of calculation'
'How so'
'Just pull the tuner out, put in a 10.7MHz signal into theh IF strip and 
look! No fucking noise'

(It turned out that wunderbar German tuner head was a pile of crap. 
They had used a zener diode to stabilize the  VCO without seeming to 
understand that a zener is an ideal noise source, and they had used 
ferrite slugs in the VCO which make marvellous detectors of magnetic 
fields. Germans are shit engineers. They make up for it by testing and 
fiddling till stuff works. A nation of technicians)

The point here is that academic knowledge can eliminate solutions that 
*cannot* work,. . like 'renewable energy' without having to spend a 
fortune trying to make it work...
Conversely practical experience is way faster than a computer model...

"Are you sure that beam will take the load of pulling an engine out of t 
forklift?"
"we pulled a bigger one out with it last week"

-- 
All political activity makes complete sense once the proposition that 
all government is basically a self-legalising protection racket, is 
fully understood.