"Leon Fisk" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 21 Oct 2017 16:03:02 -0400
"Jim Wilkins" wrote:

...
My point though... was just that some of us "see" stuff that isn't
right and other's don't, no matter how long they look.
..
Leon Fisk

I scored major points with my boss when he, I and another guy were
working on terminals in the CAD room that I managed and the third guy
complained that his printout was garbled, specifically some of the
letters had turned into the previous letter.

I had recently been looking at printer plug pin assignments and
realized that the cause could be an open lowest bit, so I suggested
that the plug might be partly disconnected. He checked and sure
enough, that was the problem.

Eventually other departments brought me problems they had given up on,
and then became annoyed when I found the fault too quickly.

One problem was using analog single point ground plane design rules
with 74AS logic. Where a bus crossed the ground plane gap there was a
1-2 nanosecond ground bounce of 3V between sides. I knew where to
look as soon as I examined the PC board artworks and spent the rest of
the 15 minutes setting up a convincing scope display.

For another I was transmitting 10 million bits at 2400 per second to a
military satellite to test the suspected error rate of a certain piece
of secure voice comm gear. Someone asked me how much longer I would be
tying up the channel, so, knowing that 1/24th is 0.0416666.. because I
had graduated a dial for a 5/16-24 lathe feed screw I quickly
calculated 4166.67 seconds and then converted it to 1 hour, 9 minutes
and 26.67 seconds (3600+540+26.67) to give them a clock time, all
mentally. None of the Ph.Ds in the room could figure out how to check
my answer with their calculators.

We know radio signals travel through space but it's still weird to
watch them disappear up there for several seconds and return intact.

-jsw