[Elecraft] When S-Meters are Useful (WAS: When do you usefastAGC?)

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

Depends on what kind of an engineer you are.  :-)  I've always been the
tinkering kind, myself, but mostly because I'm not smart enough to be the
other kind...

I worked for a guy way back in the 1970s (pre-PC days) who would sit down at
a nice clean desk with his HP calculator and an engineering pad and pencil,
and design a complex analog discrete-transistor circuit without once using
the eraser. Then he would write out the voltage, current, frequency
response, and gain figures for the circuit on a second piece of paper. These
he would hand to me to build and test. Always came out dead nuts. Amazing.

But a tinkerer? Man, you did NOT want to let this guy get anywhere near a
soldering iron! Extreme danger to self and others!!

Bill W5WVO

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I'm reminded that Guglielmo Marconi called himself the "first Radio
Amateur". He never said that he invented wireless, any of the basic
principles that define wireless, or even most of the gadgets he used to
build his wireless sets. 

What he did do was tinker with the stuff others had created and put them
together into a system that worked. Then he continued tinkering with that
system to make it work better.

Ron AC7AC