[Elecraft] KX3 microphone nut size

[Rich NE1EE]

I enjoy cooking and baking. All my recipes are in metric, and based on mass where ever I can, to get away from "cups", etc.
I am an amateur woodworker, and all my work is metric. A while back I completed a table with nearly 100 unique angles (trust me, it looks fine ;-)...all the while being told that a) I couldn't do it at all, and b) if I could, not in metric!!!
I had a guy at the place where I buy wood remark that wood was coming in "weird" dimensions! When I got home, I measured it and found that it was exact metric dimensions.
Mixing shellac is way easier in metric. You should see the hoops that you jump through using USCU.
My ham buddies are constantly remarking "oh, yeah, you use that metric stuff" when I mention that my antenna is a 40m EF. Doesn't that make more sense when I think of the bands it might work on?

***It's just a difficulty making the transition...then it's easier. I'll bet you could get everyone in the US to criticise the use of pounds, shilling, pence, and so on, when compared to the dollar in base 10...but turn the discussion to a general one of metric, and I get "but it's so confusing" all the time...is it really easier to remember conversions of feet and inches to metric for antennas? I was calculating an antenna dimension the other day, and it came to 1780mm...which is 1.78m...no fancy math involved. Imagine me calculating that in feet, and then converting to some precise measurement...I don't have a tape measure marked in decimal feet.

I bought a 30m tape that winds up into a case. It has been working fine for many years.

With regard to "12 has more factors than 10" in another post, I suggest that this is a matter of habit. Being able to divide 12 so many ways doesn't necessarily make it more useful, I opine, just more familiar. In grammar school, I had to learn a bunch of yard-foot-mile-etc conversions, but in SI, it's all base ten. I can divide 1780mm any way I want. In fact, a friend of mine who is a builder came to me for help one day calculating distances to do with an unusual roof angle. Showing him how to use his calculator to do the calcs was the easy part...the hard part was translating 20 feet 3 3/16 inches to decimal so that he could do the math, then convert that back to feet and inches. There are, I hear, calculators specifically designed to do this sort of math. Talk about a niche product.

I too a piece of heavy glass (amateur photographer equipment) to a glass place to be split in 2. You should have seen the effort to measure in USCU and divide accurately by 2, without decimals. A snap in metric.

0C as a freezing point makes so much more sense than 32F. And yes all my house temperatures report in C. And I use ISO dates yyyy-mm-dd, and 24hr time. Can't tell you the number of times there was confusion because someone was not sure if a time for some event  was 8am or pm, when the context could go either way.

***I don't say that converting our brains is easy, especially when we have learned something so fundamental as distance and volume in our youth...drilled into us, as it were. But the effort is so well worth it. I completely empathize with those who are still USCU, and find it a struggle to move to metric. The hardest unit for me is big distances. I still feel more comfortable estimating some distance as 3 miles than as 5km. Even that would be easier if the country just bit the bullet and set a time limit on moving to metric. Then we'd all be on the same page.

There are some illusions. Say I know that I need to go 15 miles, and I can do it at 60 mph. Neat, right? But what if I need to go 13 miles at 45 mph? (OK, those of us who do math estimating easily in our heads find this trivial.) But we fall into the habit of creating such shortcuts. I am much more likely to estimate a 13 or 14 mile trip as 15, so the math is easier. And 60 mph is a mile/minute, also convenient. But I could as easily get used to doing 100kph, and then saying that 50k will take 30 minutes. Driving around metric countries, it doesn't take long to see that all the speeds are in metric-friendly units, not something like 96.6 kph.

I do a lot of my own work, such as maintaining my motorcycles and such...so I have 2 sets of tools. Sigh. there was a time when I could get metric items more easily at HD, but several years ago they switched to carrying far fewer metric items.

On 2020-08-28 19:12:-0700, Fred Jensen wrote:

>In my teens, there was metric, confined to meters [or metres] used by amateur radio operators, and all the rest: inches, feet, pounds, gallons, quarts, cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, and the other plethora of stupid measures I grew up with.  We had 2x4's, which actually were not 2" x 4".  We measured nails in pennies ... I'm sure there was a reason ... OK, not so sure, but that's how it was.  Then, the US Military sent me to the other side of the planet, and over time I began to think metric. Meters, grams, kilograms, liters became normal.  I came home ... they still are normal, I now have to convert metric to stupid.  It would be great if we actually did join the rest of the world before the end of my lifetime.  But, I'm not holding my breath.
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>73,
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>Fred ["Skip"] K6DGW
>Sparks NV DM09dn
>Washoe County


~R~
72/73 de Rich NE1EE
On the banks of the Piscataqua