[ICOM] Sherwood Engineering test numbers

[mel martin]

Numbers are important, but can never tell the whole story. Case in point...
I had an "I" and a "Y" transceiver years ago (not current models". Sherwood
numbers indicated that "I" was the better "RX" however I preferred "Y" for
multi-transmitter operation (Field Day), it seemed "cleaner", so I tried to
find out why in the "lab".

The "I", when the front was overloaded at a certain level suddenly fell
apart with all kinds of spurs in the passband rendering it unusable...
Whereas the "Y" would gracefully degrade and slowly turn deaf as the
interfering signal increased. I preferred the latter behaviour, but I'm not
sure how that can be reflected in the numbers...

Also...

***Physists have "proven" that a bumblebee can't fly.***

Untrue... this quote is apocryphal... But it just won't die ;-)

Below is correspondance from someone who extended considerable effort
tracking it down.

Mel...
VE2DC


From: "McMasters, John H" <John.McMasters at PSS.Boeing.com>
To: "'rusin at math.niu.edu'" <rusin at math.niu.edu>
Subject: FW: Bumblebee Flight
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 12:47:46 -0700

It's your web site so you get a helping of the below as well.
[message below is a cc: of email to several people mentioned above -- djr]
> From: 	McMasters, John H
> Sent: 	Wednesday, October 13, 1999 12:28 PM
> Subject: 	Bumblebee Flight
 
I was stumbling around on the web a couple of days ago and came
across a site http://www.math.niu.edu/-rusin/known-math/98/bees that
has a string of exchanges from the addressee of this note.  Well this
is kind of old by now, but I was surprised to find my name mentioned
by one of the correspondents, and since there was no clear resolution
of the issue, i thought I'd "finish the job" in case anyone still
cares.
 
A long time ago [1989] I wrote an article for the journal American
Scientist entitled: "The Flight of the Bumblebee and Related Myths of
Entomological Engineering" (Am. Sci., Vol. 77, pp. 164-8).  In this I
gave what still appears to be a correct account of the "Didn't the
aerodynamicist prove that the bumblebee can't fly ? [sarcastic ha ha]"
story.  I too had tried to find the name of "The aerodynamicist" who
did this to us.  After a long search I was told by a very reputable
source that he thought that individual (who was badly misrepresented
subsequently by the "press") was the Swiss gas dynamicist Jacob
Ackeret - a famous name in supersonic aerodynamics.  It was about the
right vintage, so I wrote that in my article without naming Ackeret
explicitly.  Follwoing publication, however, I got mail.  Boy did I
get mail - including half a dozen xerox copies of portions of the text
of the book Le Vol Des Insects (Hermann and Cle, Paris, 1934) by the
famous entomologist August Magnan.  On page 8 of the introduction, one
finds:
 
    "Tout d'abord pouss'e par ce qui fait en aviation, j'ai applique' aux
    insectes les lois de la resistance del'air, et je suis arrive' avec
    M. SAINTE-LAGUE a cette conclusion que leur vol es impossible."
 
Thus the culprit is finally named: Sainte-Lague, Magnan's lab
assistant who was apparently some sort of engineer.  Steve Vogel has
correctly added some of the rest of the story and there is more to
come thanks to the miracles of high-speed photography and advances in
computational physics.  As an aside, anyone who hasn't read Steve's
wonderful books should.  They are classics - all of them.
 
Share and enjoy.

John McMasters
Technical fellow
The Boeing company
Seattle, Washington