[time-nuts] Oncore, Trimble Antennae

Lux, James P james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov
Wed Oct 22 14:25:57 UTC 2008




On 10/22/08 6:04 AM, "Chuck Harris" <cfharris at erols.com> wrote:

> Matthew Smith wrote:
>> Quoth Chuck Harris at 2008-10-22 15:01...
>>
>>>> I'd be interested to know if any antennas are in fact the other
>>>> way around. Never even considered that.
>>> It would have been fairly trivial for them to put a bridge rectifier
>>> before the amplifier's power stuff, allowing for either polarity.
>>>
>>> I always try to do that kind of thing (when I can) in my designs...
>>> I wonder if they did?
>>
>> What, and use an extra component?  The accountants would never allow it!
>
> That's really kind of funny, in 29 years as an engineer, I have never
> had an accountant talk to me about design decisions.  I tell them what
> it will cost, and they say ok.


Lucky you...

In the consumer electronics world, they do BOM scrubs and whole multi
work-year analyses to figure out how to remove a few square millimeters of
PWB, or even better, what's the trade between some jumpers and a single
sided board and a double sided board, and do we really need plated through
holes.  I worked on a project where they spent about 4-6 work months to
eliminate a couple capacitors at a nickle each. When you're making
10,000,000 units, that nickle per cap turns into a million bucks, many times
the few tens of $K the engineering time cost.

In the space electronics world, you'd do the same BOM scrub, but there the
idea is to eliminate parts that might fail, or add mass, or require testing
(each different part in the part list adds something like $5K-$10K from a
testing, inventory control, etc. standpoint)


Jim




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