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Commercial interest ?
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microwaveengineer1968
One thing that comes up more and more often from people on this
newsgroup is the .... im not doing anything unlessi get paid for it ! dont get me wrong i like money as much as anyone else and im not this well off that i dont need any income but lets reflect and think about it for a second.... If many of the great inventors would have shown this attitude than we would be without a phone, light or electricity and the laws of basic electronics would never been written! Lets face it, many of the great inventors didnt start out because they wanted to make money, they were tinkerers who liked to dabble around and wanted to make things better, true in many cases wealth and large companies came out of the original invention but it was not the primary concern of the guy when he spend countless hours, days and month sometimes years in the lab going trough trial after trial facing the riddicule of friends family and sometimes even peers ! There are still many hams designing microwave circutry and publishing detailed instructions on how to build their creations in magazines for anyone to build without asking for any compensation. Lets take for example Michael Kuhne DB6NT of germany who pioneered many easy to build 10,24 and 47GHz designs, he did all the work in his spare time, published many instructions and articles in DUBUS and traveled from SHF convention to convention to promote his designs and to answer questions from newcomers on how to build and improve those designs, all on his own money without any commercial interest ! True sooner or later a company resulted out of it and today kuhne electronic is good in business but it was not the primary idea of michael when he started designing his stuff ! Sometimes we just need to step back and do things out of technical interest without asking the $ question first, after all the good book tells us that who seeks his rewards on this earth shall get their rewards here and not in heaven ! |
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swingbyte
I have read with some amusement and disappointment the responses you received from your offer to make gears for people. I personally thought it was a great offer and as soon as I need any gears I'll send you an email. Never look a gift horse in the mouth!
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After studying how a lot of rich people got rich I have discovered one of the answers. They do what they enjoy doing without thinking of getting rich. Entrepreneurs don't care about money as much as they care about what they're doing to make it. HP started two guys doing what they wanted to, Apple, Intel and most other super businesses all have that in common. Certainly lots of people do jobs they don't like but those that start from nothing usually make it doing something they like. The hard part is knowing WHAT you like to do!!! Once you discover that, you'll do it well and the rewards will come from being the best. Now after that little philosophy lesson ; I chose an 8565 over an 8569 because after watching ebay for several months, it seems that the extra cost ( >in $AU 1000) was not justified. I can do digitisation - its what I do for work and the ADCs available now are cheaper and faster and everything else better. What is important to me is the RF capability which is almost identical with option 100 on the 8565 - and outside my current home construction and design capabilities!! So for $1000 less I have an SA that does what I want rf-wise, I have already designed and built a USB digitiser that I can use with it - more capable than the 8569 HPIB. But I'd like to have it all self contained in the one box - so I will probably start to modify and hack the display section anyway. Lothar - Thanks for the tip on LCD screens -I will look into that. The Stratix chip is the one I was thinking of using. The reason I was looking at high speed ADCs was to implement the rosenfell system HP uses. Have fun! See you later Tim microwaveengineer1968 wrote:
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J Forster
True, within limits. There is a big difference between working on
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something with real upside potential and supporting something an insrument which is reaching the end of it's service life. The former makes financial sense, the latter does not. That does not mean it's not worth doing, but just not for financial reasons. I'm specifically thinking of the Tek 547 HV Transformer and the 8640 gears. Best, -John microwaveengineer1968 wrote: One thing that comes up more and more often from people on this |
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lothar baier
I used the stratix because i had a eval board for it on hand, for cost reasons i would not recommend this family ! Cyclone3 are pretty good and Lattice has low cost FPGAs with build in SERDES for high speed interface so i would go with one of those.
Who said that i have given up on the gears ? i havent , as a matter of fact one of my former motorola coworkers offered a 8640B with problems as a parts mule for just that purpose ! As soon as i finish painting and setting the machine up i will start on it swingbyte <swingbyte@...> wrote: I have read with some amusement and disappointment the responses you received from your offer to make gears for people. I personally thought it was a great offer and as soon as I need any gears I'll send you an email. Never look a gift horse in the mouth! After studying how a lot of rich people got rich I have discovered one of the answers. They do what they enjoy doing without thinking of getting rich. Entrepreneurs don't care about money as much as they care about what they're doing to make it. HP started two guys doing what they wanted to, Apple, Intel and most other super businesses all have that in common. Certainly lots of people do jobs they don't like but those that start from nothing usually make it doing something they like. The hard part is knowing WHAT you like to do!!! Once you discover that, you'll do it well and the rewards will come from being the best. Now after that little philosophy lesson ; I chose an 8565 over an 8569 because after watching ebay for several months, it seems that the extra cost ( >in $AU 1000) was not justified. I can do digitisation - its what I do for work and the ADCs available now are cheaper and faster and everything else better. What is important to me is the RF capability which is almost identical with option 100 on the 8565 - and outside my current home construction and design capabilities!! So for $1000 less I have an SA that does what I want rf-wise, I have already designed and built a USB digitiser that I can use with it - more capable than the 8569 HPIB. But I'd like to have it all self contained in the one box - so I will probably start to modify and hack the display section anyway. Lothar - Thanks for the tip on LCD screens -I will look into that. The Stratix chip is the one I was thinking of using. The reason I was looking at high speed ADCs was to implement the rosenfell system HP uses. Have fun! See you later Tim microwaveengineer1968 wrote:
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lothar baier
Financial interest makes sense if you start a company and want to make money, if i would have the intension to start a business selling replacements for obsolete parts than for sure i would go broke after not even a year !
If you do something commercially you have to calculate your costs and then make a weight of what price the market supports, you have to put everything in the equation to make a profit which you have to make in order to make ends meet ! Things are not so if you just do something on the side for fun, normally you have a job that pays the bills, if you have a shop in the backyard or house than normally its paid for and the power and water bill are gonna get paid anyway, you dont have any employees and normally you already bought the machines and tools because you wanted to have them for a hobby, you also dont have the latest and greatest CNC controlled machines and a $100000 loan on your back which you needed to buy them ! Time is not an issue in a hobby shop , whether it takes you 10minutes to make a gear or 1hr, who cares you are not paying anyone to do it ! As long as you are doing it for fun its ok, lets see what else would i do if i wouldnt dabble around on machines or in my electronics lab ? probably sitting somewhere on a lake fishing or watching TV - if you want to put economics to it then you might not want to go fishing or watch tv either - how many $$$ you spend on fishing gear and licence ? then you sit around for hours on a lake to catch some fish that if you put economics to it you could have bought cheaper at a local market ! watching TV all you do is use electricity and spend a boatload on a new HDTV all without getting anything in return but entertainment - well entertainment for some people is to fix a old piece of equipment the main difference is that they are learning something as a side effect while the TV junkies only getting brain fried ! J Forster <jfor@...> wrote: True, within limits. There is a big difference between working on something with real upside potential and supporting something an insrument which is reaching the end of it's service life. The former makes financial sense, the latter does not. That does not mean it's not worth doing, but just not for financial reasons. I'm specifically thinking of the Tek 547 HV Transformer and the 8640 gears. Best, -John microwaveengineer1968 wrote: One thing that comes up more and more often from people on this --------------------------------- Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage. |
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Ok Lothar, that one was aimed directly at me, so I must respond!
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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: One thing that comes up more and more often from people on this newsgroup is the .... im not doing anything unlessi get paid for it ! dont get me wrong i like money as much as anyone else and im not this well off that i dont need any income but lets reflect and think about it for a second.... |
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lothar baier
the old saying - if the shoe fits wear it comes to mind :) but i wasnt actually aiming at you
Well, i dont have any dogs in this race either - i just recently got a 8753B which thank god has a good CRT, i have a 8757A with a bad CRT that i aquired specifically for this project, i dont own a 8640B either, a friend of mine volunteered one for the cause, what will happen to the unit after the work is done is not clear, maybe i will fix it up with a set of stailess steel "live forever" gears and create a replacement for the output amp and keep it around the lab. I take on a project not because i want to make money or to get anything out of it but because im trying to help others and because i see a challenge in it thats all there are still quite a few people left who think this way as well - thank god ! Chuck Harris <cfharris@...> wrote: 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: One thing that comes up more and more often from people on this --------------------------------- Get easy, one-click access to your favorites. Make Yahoo! your homepage. |
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