[Elecraft] If it plugs in, then it should work

[Dauer, Edward]

I agree with both Richard (K8ZTT) and with Guy (K2AV), in that all safety 
and error prevention strategies have to be subject to a practical 
cost-benefit analysis.  That’s true even in healthcare — when you receive 
a transfusion, the transfused blood type is checked five or six times, not 
ten or fifteen, even though that might add a sigma or two to the mismatch 
incidence rate.  Everything has declining marginal returns and some things 
have returns that start out less than their costs.  No argument there.

That said - and again confessing that I am not an electrical engineer - 
there may be some things that could be addressed cost effectively.  For 
example, the reverse polarity problem that Alan (G4GNX) mentioned.  Would 
it be cost effective to have reverse polarity supply and use connectors 
made green rather than black, or something like that?  That shouldn’t cost 
too much.

I don’t mean to be passionate about this.  But as a lawyer (and a pilot) 
and a professor of healthcare policy, I have spent a fair part of my 
careers helping clients overcome inertia in advancing safety in the fields 
where I’ve worked.  Reading that RTFM may be enough just struck me as out 
of phase with all of the QA literature of the last 15 years.  It is 
essential that operators study the manual, of course; but it is not 
sufficient.  Systems should assume that human error will happen anyway, 
and be robust enough to block the errors that inevitably happen.

Again, I agree that when the cost of more attention to prevention exceeds 
its value in the practical world, that should be the end of it.  And so 
I’ll go QRT with my part in this thread . . . 

Thanks for the comments and replies.  As always, I gain a lot from this 
reflector.  The benefits are worth far more than the cost.

Ted, KN1CBR




On 8/23/15, 10:39 AM, "Guy Olinger K2AV" <k2av.guy at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>Good luck retrofitting that on 15 year old electronics. Also are you
>ready to spend 25$ per connector because your application differs in
>some way and everyone has to invent a new connector for a new use
>which can never benefit from economy of scale. Or perhaps we should
>just quit inventing anything new.
>
>Aircraft safety is a completely different animal, where the money
>*WILL* be spent for safety issues bearing on loss of life, even if an
>item now costs $1000 instead of $10 because it is now a very specific
>quality-warrantied small-volume item that can never be
>mass-manufactured in 100,000 or 500,000 count runs. I'll pay my
>portion of the cost of all of that, to be safe on my airplane trips.
>But my K2 ain't an airplane, and I don't sit in it at 35,000 feet
>doing 500 knots.
>
>On reason K2's are affordable is because they do NOT use a lot of
>specialty one-of-a-kind items. And how many would be complaining if it
>needed a hard to find specialty plug on the back. We can't afford
>stuff made idiot-proof to the extent that RTFM is never needed for
>success
>
>DB9 and DB15 are used for all kinds of non-standard stuff, all over
>the place (not just Elecraft)...  Don't EVER put any male DB9 or DB15
>or DB25 in any female DB9 or DB15 or DB25 without knowing what is on
>all the pins.
>
>And then what is DB25, serial or parallel port, or something weird?
>You always have to look at a DB25 which could be anything.
>
>Look at the back of a MicroHam box sometime, which has dozens of
>specialty connections to DB25's. Separate one of a kind jack for each
>cable connection?
>
>We really do hate to RTFM, don't we...
>
>I heard one XYL remark at a wives-invited ham function that her
>husband wouldn't RTFM any more than he would ask for directions, or
>even look at the all-language comic book assembly guide for that
>Christmas present, some assembly required.
>
>A friend of mine blew up a beautiful Alpha 99 he'd gotten off eBay for
>a really good price because he didn't read the manual for setup and
>fed 240V to a transformer that was strapped by the previous owner to
>120. That was really expensive. I remember him saying that if I
>mentioned RTFM even once he'd come after me with a club. His eBay
>savings was wiped out and quite a bit more by the repair cost.
>
>But it was just one more of a bazillion examples of the trouble we
>cause ourselves in every aspect of life by our seeming intransigent
>unwillingness to RTFM before making assumptions and sticking things in
>things.
>
>We shouldn't be asking others to make it safe for our failure to RTFM.
>YOU blow it up, YOU suck it up. It's the manly thing to do.
>
>73, Guy K2AV