[time-nuts] Thunderbolt Display

[johncroos at aol.com]

It has been my pleasure to own and operate the VK4GHZ Thunderbolt display for
several months. It works good, does what is should and I am totally pleased with it. It was easily installed and operated from the get go. If I did not have one I would have
appreciated being notified of the of such a product via this list so I could buy it.

It has been my good fortune to be Chief Engineer or VP of engineering for a number of RF organizations prior to my retirement. As such one must estimate and then defend to management, customers or the government, the non-recurring engineering costs for every project. So I can say with some confidence, rotary switches or not, this device required several hundred hours of design time for which the designer will never recover the true cost unless he values his time at 8 cents an hour. So a hearty well done to VK4GHZ from this old engineer.

Further despite the pompous pretense of "High SNR" I see things a bit different -

1. Many are too lazy to delete the previous emails when commenting - resulting infinitely redundant repetition of previous comments. So much for not wasting bandwidth.

2. There is a tendency to hammer someone to death for being "off topic". So what, I cannot see that the "on topic" stuff is all that vital to the good of mankind. Interesting, and invaluable sometimes, but if the space wasted by the practices noted in item 1 were devoted to some of stuff judged "off topic" - this list would be a lot more interesting.

An example was the never-ending discussion of RS-232 a couple of weeks back. I believe that every possible mickey-mouse way to not do an RS-232 interface properly was floated. Yet this is "on topic". 

I even noted that one person - who most of us respect - manged to volunteer the notion that "no one should use RS-232 now days". Hunh?? Why not? It works and the USB disadvantaged such as myself manage to get by with it while implementing our projects.

So it is my view that a number of members of this group could use a large injection of common courtesy, and should not be so critical of the efforts of others.

After all, it is a hobby.

-73 john K6IQL