[Elecraft] Component Body Colours

[Fred Jensen]

Kevin Luxford wrote:
> The discussion on the RF Choke Question prompts me to observe that not 
> only are component body colours apparently at the whim of the 
> manufacturer, but that some of the body colours chosen seem to make it 
> very hard to read the bands.  Is this band yellow or is it orange?  Or 
> is it brown?  Blue bodied 1% resistors I find especially difficult.

Ever considered that you might be colorblind?  :-) Just kidding, but I 
am a monochromie, although I didn't really know it until I got to 
college.  I'd figured out I was having a hard time distinguishing the 
color bands on the big molded caps and carbon resistors when I was a 
teenage ham [they were much bigger then], but everyone (and I) just put 
it off to bad light.

In the general population, the huge majority of color-challenged folk 
will be male.  Very rare in females. Nearly all hams are male.  Go 
figure, maybe God is not on our side? :-)   In a population of males, 
the vast majority will have some sort of color vision defect, most 
minor.  Most will be an inability to detect differences between two 
specific colors, or differences between shades of one color [I'm quoting 
the scientific literature here, I have no idea what this means, of 
course].  Us monochromies make up maybe 1% of the male population and we 
have it easy ... the world looks like old monochrome TV programs ... or 
like the Windows default color scheme only without the color.  Since 
that's all I've ever known, it looks pretty normal to me.  OTOH, I can 
see at night far better than any of you can -- so there!

I truly appreciated the taped resistors for the K2.  I measured every 
one, but I didn't have to hunt for each one.  The other color-coded 
components [not many] were tagged by my wife, who has perfect color 
vision.  The rest had the smallest numbers you can imagine on them, but 
no colors that mattered.

Fred K6DGW
Auburn CA CM98lw