TV distribution system project

You sad, sad, little person.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright
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You missed out the 'or something'.

But if the bit you quoted it the important bit to you, so be it.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

This is a pity where a plug that wasn't that clever came to be commonplace..

A bit like the PL259 plug used in 50 ohm radio applications which some makers like ICOM still insist on fitting;(..

I've fitted a lot of these over time and sometimes yes, you can get the braid folded back over the collett and sometimes not, depends on who makes them. I don't think here was ever a "right way" to do it;!.

The real problem is with the inner pin most all riggers just leave the thing loose with a slight kink in the inner to make a very weak rubbing contact with the pin, sometimes they are "crimped" with a pair of side cutters which makes a slightly better joint but still not good enough they really must be soldered to be effective and if you have a clean wire and clean plug, hot iron then it can be done without tears..

Well depending on what the centre insulator is made of..

Reply to
tony sayer

Jeez!...

U live in a block of flats perhaps;?...

Reply to
tony sayer

Well there yer go!, thats Posh!, well posh to have a Racks room;-))....

Latest must have on estate agents blurb apart from Fibre broadband of course;!...

Reply to
tony sayer

I think we all know that top notch broadcast wiremen work to much neater standards that domestic aerial riggers, especially those of the latter group who are installing old gear in their own basement!

However you might be interested to know that my appalling installation standard results in zero call-backs and has done for donkey's years. So I must be doing something right. I find that in general customers aren't too concerned about a few strands of braid sticking out of the back of the coax plugs on the board at the far end of their loft.It's all about time and money, and practicality.

My toilet training went very smoothly and was angst-free, according to my mum, and I guess that's why I'm not anally retentive.

To hopefully open up the discussion to others, I have noticed that when I do something that isn't my 'special skill' -- in other words, woodwork or metalwork or painting or something -- I am far too neat and careful! No-one could earn money doing it as carefully and slowly as that. And when I come across a domestic DIY aerial job it's often the case that the cable is taped to the mast at intervals of exactly 125.00mm etc etc. This leads me to wonder if part of the art of being a professional is to know where to draw the line; to know what matters and what doesn't. Watch a professional cook and she will take dreadful liberties, or so it seems to a learner, yet the results are good. Comments anyone?

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

Just excuses for a lack of pride in your work. You're quick enough to criticise others for what you consider poor workmanship.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Workmanship! Never has a term generated more bullshit.

The vast majority of "workmanship" is a massive waste of time and money. In fact, in general "workmanship" is just another term for "exceeding the requirements".

Take Bill's cabling board. I strongly suspect that the quality of the connections, the cable cleating, and all the other stuff is *exactly* as good as it needs to be to meet Bill's requirements.

I used to be a Divisional Quality Manager in BT and a trained ISO9001 quality auditor, so this subject is not entirely alien to me. Quality means "Meeting the agreed requirements, first time, at the lowest possible cost." There are other definitions but they all amount to the same thing.

What Bill, and any other professional must do, is make sure they fully understand the requirements. For instance, if Bill was preparing a cabling board for use as an exemplar in a training school, then the neatness of its appearance would be extremely important. In his own cellar or loft, it is of almost no importance.

If maintainability by unknown third parties is a requirement, then again the design and construction of the board may well be very different.

Another obvious requirement is that the board must provide all the right functionality, the right reliability, and the right durability. Unless YOU personally know what those requirements are, you are in no position at all to criticise. And let's be absolutely clear: that bit of braid you refer to makes ABSOLUTELY NO difference to any of those criteria.

Any worker who wastes time doing something better than it needs doing is due a bollocking from his/her boss, because it's the company's time and money he's wasting.

When neatness is important, it must be neat. When it isn't important, it can be either neat or not neat, so long as no unnecessary time is spent on it. When expandability is important, then it must have provision for such; if not, then it need not. When durability is important, then it must be designed to provide that; if not, it need not.

How often does this need saying? *Meeting the requirements for the lowest cost* is what is important. Understanding the requirements - which you manifestly cannot - is essential. Exceeding the requirements is something you can do in your own time if you wish, but never in company time.

Reply to
Steve Thackery

Stop trying to wind me Dave. It's like a small child testing the patience of its parents.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

I once complained to the CAI about an aerial installation by one of their members where the resulting picture was so covered in cci that it was almost unwatchable. The customer concerned apparently had a watchable signal before but wind took the serial down. The new installation used a different transmitter with amplifier, so naturally quite expensive. In your neck of the woods, Bill - somewhere to the South East of Sheffield. Anyhow, the CAI adjudicator said that because it was such a neat & tidy installation (downlead taped to the mast at regular intervals) there was nothing wrong. I lost my faith in the organisation after that.

Reply to
charles

I think you've expressed very well and in better detail what I was trying to say about the way a professional will be able to judge what the necessary standard is, and then work to it.

Funnily enough I watched a butcher preparing a lamb for sale this afternoon (no such thing as a day of rest round these parts!) and I was struck by what seemed to me to be the rather haphazard way he was doing it. Yet the finished result was very good. Obviously what looked haphazard to me wasn't really. It was his skill at knowing what needed doing carefully and what didn't.

An often forgotten part of 'good workmanship' is to consider what level of record keeping is appropriate. This is of course associated with the need to make a layout physically clear and easy to follow if that is a necessity. I've always been keen on good record keeping. It really pays dividends. But you don't have to overdo it. We will always keep a very accurate and detailed record of a large, complex, and unique job, but we don't keep records at all of the hundreds of little systems that comprise an aerial, and amplifier, and 14 downleads. There's no point.

As it happens something last night that made me pleased with my record keeping (SMUG SMUG SMUG). Our front entrance doesn't have a gate, the gate being some distance up the drive. I don't mind people turning round in the drive, but last night this bloke actually came and parked up in the yard and sat there making phone calls for ten minutes. There's a layby almost opposite, for goodness sake. I was watching him on the CCTV. When I finally went out to see what he was about he saw me coming and shot off. Cheeky bastard. Anyway, I've decided to reinstate and augment the floodlights that cover that area. They stopped working a few years ago and I've never bothered. So I had a look back and found the

1995 drawing that shows how they work, where the cables and relays are, etc. It's lucky I made a drawing because it would have been hard to figure out.

My memory is now so bad that if I don't keep a record of what I've done I get in a right old fix after a week, never mind after 19 years!

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

I always told the CAI I'd join when they started kicking the cowboys out. I used to regularly find jobs done by members that were of very poor standard.

The CAI really needed councils and so on to insist on membership before handing work out. But that never happened to any extend, in reality, although it did sometimes happen on paper. I never lost work as a result of not being a member.

It's a great pity that there is no proper regulation of the aerial and satellite industry.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

Crikey. Do you actually understand what you write?

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

One of the saddest posts I've read in a while.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

not as sad as yours is

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

In article , charles scribeth thus

Jeez!, That just shows who useful they .. aren't!...

Reply to
tony sayer

One of my areas of interest is horology (the science and craft of timekeeping). I cannot fully engage with the horological community, or it's heritage, because there is an enormous emphasis put on "finish", with remarkably little put on the technical merits of the device.

It cannot be said too often: shiny clock plates with razor sharp corners and a mirror finish make absolutely no difference, no difference *whatsoever*, to the timekeeping performance of the clock. In fact, it is completely normal to see a clock with an extremely mediocre technical design, but with the most superb finish on all the parts. A joy to look at, but performance wise? Well, very ordinary indeed.

Just one brief example. At a clock show at the British Horological Institute a few years ago, I saw a beautiful carriage clock with a most unusual escapement: it had a large balance wheel mounted with the rim vertical (i.e. with the arbor horizontal between the plates), and it turned left and right in a slow and pleasing manner.

I congratulated the maker on it, and he thanked me and said he hadn't designed it himself, just made it. He also said that it was a terrible timekeeper. I looked at it and realised that the "balance wheel" wasn't actually a real balance wheel* at all, but a compound pendulum** formed into a wheel. With such a low oscillating frequency the Q factor was probably somewhere in the single or low double figures, so it had no chance at all of keeping decent time.

So I said to they guy "Well, it's a compound pendulum, isn't it, so it won't keep good time, because of the low Q value." To which he replied, "Oh, I dunno anything about that, mate."

This is an example of superb, perhaps outstanding workmanship and yet the clock was shit at its primary task. That is NOT a good quality product.

UNLESS, that is, you say to a clockmaker "I want it to look fabulous but don't worry about the timekeeping", in which case that clock would meet the customer's requirements perfectly and be a very good quality product.

My point being that "good workmanship" is only "good" if that's what the customer wanted and is willing to pay for. If you slave away making the most beautiful movement, and then it's encased in a wood box so it's never seen, then honestly you've wasted a whole stack of time and money.

Quality is what the customer asks for, NOT what you want to provide!

Reply to
Steve Thackery

Wonderful! Be sad.

Reply to
Steve Thackery

...

Bet you've got a Harrison H4 chronometer at home somewhere;?...

Reply to
tony sayer

Ooooh, no! Not my cuppa tea. Although Harrison deserves credit for proving that it could be done, almost none of H4's technology found its way into the traditional marine chronometers.

I do have a WW2 Hamilton M21 marine chronometer, though. What makes them so magnificent is that they were mass produced, and yet still offered the very finest performance.

Harrison got his timekeepers so good by an astonishing amount of fine tuning. The same is true, to be honest, of almost all marine chronometers since. Hamilton's breakthrough was getting such superb performance from a product that was stamped out by machines and required far less fettling to bring to specification.

Sorry, this is no doubt exceedingly boring and profoundly OT (although I did mention Q earlier, so perhaps that makes it OK).

Reply to
Steve Thackery

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