Forever and beyond

Some of you know that I have a real job in another industry, not quite dissimilar to electronics. An industry based on mechanical engineering and precision manufacturing of a product which has to meet very strict performance standards, yet often sold to users who have high expectations and no understanding of the basic concepts.

A mechanical watch is a marvel of engineering. A testimony to 500 years of development, painstaking effort to miniaturise, attain perfection in both performance and craftsmanship. Which obviously comes at a cost.

Yet some owners believe that a mechanical watch is made to run forever, to perform flawlessly without maintenance, or regular service. To them it is quite a shock to learn that every five years a watch mechanism has to be pulled apart, cleaned, worn parts replaced, reassembled, lubricated, recalibrated and adjusted, polished, and made water resistant. The other surprise is that such a process could take weeks, or even months. Even the most basic automatic watch contains over 200 components. A mildly complex mechanism would have more than 300.  A Patek Philippe watch introduced in 2015 took eight years to assemble and has 2,826 parts, 242 jewels, 31 hands.

Which, I guess, is probably the amount of individual electronic components in an ICOM 9700. Luckily a modern radio transceiver does not need to be pulled apart down to the last component every five years. But to expect it to last forever, and to perform flawlessly, as per specification, year after year, with no service, no repair, no adjustment and no recalibration would be simply ridiculous.

Last night I joined the IC-9700 Facebook group with 7,800 users. The group mainly serves as a ‘have a question’ and ‘need help’ forum. After reading more than two hundred posts, it became obvious that almost all problems fit in four baskets: poor or inadequate power supply, lack of separation between transmitting and receiving antennas / bad duplexers, common mode current RF issues within the shack and RTFM problems. Really, nothing to do with the maker of the radio itself. Yes, there were a couple ‘bad display / bad pixel’ posts, but again, a display replacement, as inconvenient as it may be, is an easily rectifiable issue, a teething problem of the ‘display industry’ we have to live with.

Before we complain, perhaps, we should spare a minute or two to remember the radio pioneers who designed and built their own radios with their bare hands, using surplus components long passing the expiry date. What would they think of us, modern amateurs, if ‘time machined’ to 2023? Enlightened? Advanced? Sophisticated? Or perhaps, spoiled, harbouring unrealistic expectations, theatrically abusing social media to vent about some kind of ‘technological injustice’ forced upon us, faultless consumers?

Quite frankly, the fact that most things work most of the time is a miracle in itself. We are doing just fine.