When I was a young engineer working for Motorola Communication Division in Chicago I recall a meeting where the engineers met with upper level management on the release to production of a UHF mobile radio. Each engineer had some additional tests they wanted to perform before it was released to production and out of our hands. After listening to our concerns for a fairly long time he said - "If it was up to you engineers we would never release anything to production and we would have nothing to sell and we would not have any money to pay you with". Never forgot that.
Any engineer worthy of his salt is never 100% sure about anything that is going into an environment they can not control. The problem comes in when there is suddenly more time to do additional testing and the time is used to try out fun exciting new things rather than the much less interesting and often boring testing and refining the existing product. I do hope the hard working FOX crew takes advantage of the time they have been given to make sure everything is right with the good work they have done rather than trying out some new fun interesting things that could wind up flying without adequate testing. We need something that works not necessarily the latest trendy technology gadget. I have seen this happen with unpleasant results in other non-AMSAT projects. In any event thanks to the Fox crew for their hard work. W9KE Tom Doyle _______________________________________________ Sent via [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
