On Mon, 22 Aug 2016 14:20:59 -0400
Bob Bownes bownes@gmail.com wrote:

Is there any advantage of using groups.io compared to a traditional
mailinglist? If not, I would prefer a traditional mailinglist.
But maybe I am just oldfashioned :-)

		Attila Kinali

--
It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All
the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no
use without that foundation.
-- Miss Matheson, The Diamond Age, Neil Stephenson

I agree.

On 8/22/2016 2:44 PM, Attila Kinali wrote:

I also prefer old-style e-mail-only mailing lists. Fortunately, you can
subscribe to a groups.io mailing list via e-mail. Just send “SUBSCRIBE" in
the body to svna+subscribe@groups.io

Thanks,

David Slik
VE7FIM

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 3:08 PM, Wes wes@triconet.org wrote:

Moin,

I am going here a little bit off-topic. Please bear with me for a second,
because I think it is likely that people on technical mailinglists/forums
might run into this problem at some point in their life.

On Mon, 22 Aug 2016 16:16:16 +0100
"Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd)" drkirkby@kirkbymicrowave.co.uk wrote:

Yes, lots of companies do get very unhappy when they see negative
mentiones of their product. Quite a few of them also do not get that
a mailinglist/forum/... is not responsible for what their users write.
Some even threaten to sue, in case a negative remark is not removed
IMEDIATELY!!!1!einself

There are two ways to handle this: Give in and remove the offending
post or ignore the threats. Legaly, there is not much a company can
do about such post, as long as they are factual (can you sue a magazine
for giving a bad review?). Such messages are covered by free speech and
unless they are made up or defamation, they are perfectly legal. But
proving that in curt might or might not put a burden on the owner of
the mailinglist/forum. Having dealt with threats of similar nature
(patent and copyright claims) a couple of times in the past, my opinion
is that these threats are best either ignored or reported to officials as
duress. But whether you can afford to do that highly depends on where you
live and what your ISP's opinon is on these kind of claims. I have been
lucky to live in a country without DMCA and to have choosen an ISP that
will not move a bit without an official curt order. Others might not be
as lucky.

Those cases where we got legal nastygrams (usually per email, which is
not legaly binding) were all resolved by either ignoring them or talking to
them. All but one actually got that their local laws do not apply in other
countries (yes, we got DMCA'ed more than once) and if they wanted something,
they would have to go through the local legal system, which would cost them
more in money and reputation then they were willing to pay. Not once were we
ever actually sued (though i know that VLC got into a legal dispute with
Dolby but it never actually went to curt).

So, whether you want to keep negative comments on a forum/mailinglist or
not depends on where you live, where the server is located and whether
you can afford to get sued (even if the risk is increadibly low).

		Attila Kinali

--
It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All
the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no
use without that foundation.
-- Miss Matheson, The Diamond Age, Neil Stephenson

In message 20160823001519.8c2718305f109c2197f718e9@kinali.ch, Attila Kinali w
rites:

I'd say three, because I don't think "Go a head, sue me, I live in
${country_other_than_USA}." has ever failed :-)

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG        | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer      | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

On 22 August 2016 at 23:15, Attila Kinali attila@kinali.ch wrote:

Yes. It is interesting to note that one of the reviews by G3GXG on eHam of
the RigExpert AA-600, which is the product I was referring to, says

"I tried sharing my concerns on the RigExpert site but every time I did, my
comments were removed. This is clearly a raw subject for them."

Personally, I write what I think is fair, and if that offends them, let
them try to sue me. But I can understand others not wishing to take the
same view - especially if in the USA. But unfortunately we have a lot of
"no win no fee" lawyers here now in the UK. It is a big "industry". I've
not seen it move to things like technical comments about products, but it
could well happen.

Dave

A friend some 20 years ago was the risk manager of a large health care
corporation. When confronted with an individual threatening a groundless or
nuisance lawsuit, she would smile sweetly and say, "Go right ahead. I have
more than a hundred lawyers on the payroll. How many do you have?"

Largely threat and intimidation and bluff but how many of us want to take
the chance?

Just be sure that what you write is demonstrably factual and do not write
with the intention to cause harm. Then hunker down and let the suits vent
their spleens. It is almost always the marketing department that does the
threatening, not the legal department.

On Monday, August 22, 2016, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd) <
drkirkby@kirkbymicrowave.co.uk> wrote:

--
If you gaze long enough into the abyss, your coffee will get cold.

On 8/21/2016 3:59 PM, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd) wrote:

In general, a resistive bridge will always require a
transformer/180 degree hybrid/differential amplifier
to make it work.  If you are going to go to the trouble
of making a broadband transformer or hybrid, you might
as well just build a traditional directional coupler,
because it is no more difficult.  All the resistive
bridges I have seen are followed by broadband differential
amplifiers.  The resistive bridge itself has a minimum of
something like 15 to 20 dB loss, and the differential
amplifier has a minimum NF of 7 dB or so.  This results
in a great loss of sensitivity, but you can always get
the sensitivity back by using a narrow IF bandwidth and/or
lots of averaging, or (rarely) a high drive level from
the source.

Having said that, one of the putative advantages of a resistive
bridge is accuracy.  However, with today's calibration techniques,
this is no longer all that important, so a traditional coupler
might be more practical than it used to be.  I remember attending
the retirement party of Agilent's last great designer of couplers
(pre-calibration) and let me tell you, this guy was a total guru.
He was one of greatest practitioners in this area of all time.
He freely admitted that he was now obsolete due to calibration.
Any old coupler is good enough.

We used to have a lot of arguments at Agilent about how many
receivers were needed.  The most I ever heard advocated was 5,
and the least was 1 or 2.  I had to intervene in some of these
arguments to bring up what I call the "back door reference"
fallacy.  If you were making a "scalar" network analyzer that
only dealt with amplitude, you could make various arguments
about why you don't need so many receivers.  In principle,
1 receiver could work.  (The achilles heel of this idea
turns out to be imperfect repeatability of switches, and
very long settling times and thermal tails in switches.
None of these calibrate out).

In any event, as soon as you start talking about vector
network analyzers, you are measuring phase.  Unlike amplitude,
phase is always a relative measurement.  That is why you
need a reference ("R" channel).  You compute A/R.  This
requires a minimum of 2 receivers, an "A" and an "R".
Concurrently, not consecutively.  Architectures that skimp
on receiver count, or ostensibly omit the reference channel,
are really a cheat.  There will be some back channel between
the instrument clock and the sampling clock in the ADC that
in essence acts as a reference channel.  If there is any
warm up drift in the phase of this channel, you will get
non-correctable errors if you try to multiplex a single
receiver.  It is also another source of crosstalk on the
PC board.

Another problem with skimping on receivers is that you
can't do full 2 port calibration, I used to
have people show me "proof of concept" why they don't need
full 2 port calibration.  They would compare a test of
some simplified architecture to some top of the line VNA
and show that the measurements were the "same".  Just like
the graphs you see comparing low cost VNA's to Agilent
VNA's (it always seems to be Agilent, not one of the other
name brands).  It would often turn out that these "benchmarks"
were not good tests of the analyzer.  Changing to more
challenging tests would reveal the true superior design.

For example, if you calibrate with a short, open, and load,
and then measure the short, it always looks perfect.  But
if you add a short length of transmission line in front of
it, the simplified architecture may not work so well any
more.  This is called a "remote short" test.

Rick

One way I made someone stop complaining about what I was writing was
to post all their emails in public.  They complained about that too
and I posted their complaints.  They went away

I think the rule is that when someone sends you a letter you own it.
This was been the rule for centuries.  The guy thought if he wrote
"don't post this letter" I'd be required by some kind of contract not
to post it.  It see these in the bottoms of emails all the time.
Just think if they WERE binding, I could have a ton of fun

NOTICE, After reading this email the content of the message must be
destroyed as well and all computing equipment used to display, store
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On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 4:24 PM, William H. Fite omniryx@gmail.com wrote:

--

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California