[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
It's documented, just not publicly. That could always change.
There's no guarantee of any more than poorly commented source code and
that is true of any actively maintained software, whether it comes from
Elecraft or someone else. (It has been said that Microsoft wrote
Wordpad because they lost the source code for Write, so using the binary
is not enough.)
I didn't know they had a limited life - how many operations? What is the
failure mode?
All electromechanical components have limited lives. Typical specified
electrical lives for relays are 100,000 operations, with rather longer
mechanical ones. This is why use of the KIO2 to scan across bands is
discouraged.
The manufacturers don't specify what constitutes a failure, but an
electrical one is likely to be parametric, i.e. excessive contact
resistance, or bounce, and a mechanical one might be sluggish
changeover, fatigue failure, or, maybe they would count contact welding.
Keeping the switched voltages and currents low, and avoiding inductive
loads on the contacts may improve the electrical life, as will
tolerating higher final contact resistances.
(Note these are lifetimes and represent wearout failures. Components
may also have random failures resulting in mean time between failure
figures, which can actually (e.g. hard disks) exceed the wearout lifetime.)
--
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.
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