Right now the cheapest and most powerful tool in most designer's arsenal is digital signal processing and digital control systems.
Remember the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail." We humans are designed to process and analyze analog data, not digital data. That's why we love pictures and graphs but can't make sense out of the racket of a raw digital signal fed to an audio transducer. All of our senses work with analog inputs. The fastest computers I ever used are still among the fastest today at the tasks they are designed for, and that was back in the 1960's. They were analog computers. Digital systems became popular in recent decades because the hardware became absurdly cheap, both in cost and energy demand. With this technology, one can take an absurd "brute force" approach to a problem, including going to extremes trying to produce an analog output humans can work with efficiently, and come up with an acceptable result at an acceptable price (aided by an overwhelming amount of marketing saying "if it's digital it's better!"). But just considering the millions of active devices and the huge number of lines of code it takes to accomplish even a simple task shows just what a "brute force" solution digital systems are today, especially when one realizes that 99.9% of the same results can be had with a handful of analog parts and one or two active devices. What we haven't done over the past few decades is develop analog technologies that can be "cookie-cutter" stamped out by the billions at cheaply as digital integrated circuits. It is true that digital systems are amazingly valuable and useful but, like Alley Oop's stone axe in Moo, because they're invaluable today doesn't mean they aren't just a stop gap until we develop a more efficient technology better adapted to our analog senses. In the meantime there are those right here who prefer a K2 or K1 to a K3. And many who prefer an older vacuum tube rig to any of those. They aren't just 'conservative' or 'dinosaurs'. Many, perhaps most, are just connoisseurs of good analog signal processing which, for their purposes, they find better than even the best of today's digital systems. Ron AC7AC -----Original Message----- This was published in 2007, and makes no reference to our exalted Elecraft K3, but it's still very interesting reading, and indirectly on topic. Thanks to Adam Farson, VE7OJ / AB4OJ, for translation and hosting: http://www.ab4oj.com/dl/misc/dinosaur_concepts.pdf 73, Steve NN4X ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
