开云体育

Ok Lothar, that one was aimed directly at me, so I must respond!

I do lots of things without expectation of pay. I have coached
recreational soccer for many years. I help out with one of the
local youth orchestras. I am always available for school field trips.
I chaperon school events. I give electronics demonstrations at
my local schools. I make buttons that the schools give out as gifts
and rewards. I am involved in local zoning and planning issues that
affect my community.... I do construction, repair, and remodeling
work for friends and family... The list goes on and on. I spend
rather a lot of time not getting paid!

What I won't do, is go out and spend hundreds or thousands of
dollars, to buy instruments that I don't need or particularly want,
so I can give away my experience to help others. I need something
in the project to make it worthwhile for me to get involved.

A couple of examples which seem to have gotten a burr under your
saddle:

1) you came up with the idea to make an LCD vector display to replace
the display trays in a couple of HP scalar network analyzers. I
offered to help you by writing all of the programs necessary to make
your idea work... even though I don't own any examples of the
network analyzer. To make it possible for me to do this work I
said that I required someone to *give* me one of these network
analyzers (~ $2000) so I would have a platform on which to test my
software. That is a very cheap rate for a professional programmer
(which I am) to do your job. Instead, you went out and hired some
consultant, who was willing to work for an hourly rate... A rate
which certainly would have ended up in costing you many times more
than my bid!

2) 8640B's have been breaking delrin gears since they were introduced
40 years ago. I have been fixing these gears for much of that time.
I long ago gave up on 8640B's and moved on to synthesized signal
generators. But, in answer to the cry for help with broken gears,
I posted several notes on repair methods I had successfully used,
and offered to make available gear sets *at cost* if someone would
*give* me an 8640B 1/2/3 to use for measuring and testing the gears
(and as a minor compensation for my effort). Known working 8640B 1/2/3's
are available regularly on eBay for BIN prices in the $200 to $400
range (and they rarely sell at those prices). I did not require
a working 8640B. I figured this would be a nice way of getting the
job done, without me having to go out and buy an 8640B (which I don't
need) so I could measure it and give away the gears at cost.

I am a self employed Electrical Engineering Consultant. That is my *only*
source of income. That has been my only source of income for the last
25 years!

Electronics is not a hobby for me. It is my livelihood. I am not going
to tell you I don't enjoy messing with this old stuff. I do. That is
why I hang around these boards, and why I use this old test gear in my
consultancy. That is also why I offer to give away my professional
expertise, and only source of income, to help others with these projects.

But for me to do this, I need to keep my real boss happy, and that will
only happen if I don't *lose* money on these helpful ventures.

But, it seems to piss you off enough that you feel the need to lecture
me on being generous, helping society, etc...

Perhaps I should abandon these helpful efforts and go back to working
only with my professional customers?

-Chuck Harris


microwaveengineer1968 wrote: