Re: antennas

On Oct 2, 6:58 pm, Jeff Liebermann <je...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
CptDondo <y...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> hath wroth:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
Rich Grise <r...@xxxxxxxxxxx> hath wroth:

In a broad sense, anything that gets built had to have been designed.

Choke, cough, sputter, etc... I need a rant. I've done cleanup jobs
on products that never saw the benefits of a calculation. Many were
reverse engineered or cloned, with only a minimum understanding of the
original design[1]. The rush to market has created some truly amazing
implementations that border on butchery. In the broad sense, I agree
that most things eventually are designed, calculated, re-designed,
re-calculated, optimized, cost reduced, cost reduced some more,

And sometimes it is the final daft last minute cost reductions that
contribute to the most annoying product defects and excessive infant
mortality. Don't you just love beancounters...

<http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netos/article.php/3696296>
:-)

Cute, true, and getting worse. However, the above article is about
software abominations, which is quite different from hardware and
antennas. Software can be fixed, which is it's own punishment as the
fixes are arriving much faster than the products. There isn't
anything I've bought with software or firmware, that didn't require an
update on arrival.

Time to market and first mover advantage is viewed as far more
important than stable or fully functional software. Excel 2007 is a
fabulous example right now. It can barely chart a few thousand points
without keeling over or grinding to a standstill. Its predecessor 2003
is happy with charts containing tens of thousands of points and is an
order of magnitude faster for complex graphs. But so long as consumers
accept having defective new products shoved down their throats that is
what will happen.

There is an interesting corollary to the software game. Unlike
hardware, software does not wear out with age. Your requirements may
change until it no longer does the required job, but so long as it
does what you need you are much better off with an established
trustworthy application than the newest gee whiz flash bang premature
release.

Not so with hardware. They're not called patches, updates, or fixes.
They're called recalls, rebuilds, or warranty replacements, with all
the detrimental implications. Software is easy to fix, but not
hardware.

So, one would expect that there would be more care applied to hardware
design, to avoid the warranty recall experience. That's generally
true, but there were enough exceptions to have kept me in business.

Same for software development. People get into very strange scrapes
that need external skilled resource to sort out very late in the day.

Antenna design has other important advantages. You can't see it work.
You can't tell how it works. Product comparisons are almost
impossible. Nobody understands the numbers. RF and antennas are
indistinguishable from magic.

Some are. I have met a few antenna designers who really know what they
are doing. Large phased arrays have to be exactly right or they don't
perform anything like to specification.

Regards,
Martin Brown

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