RadioBanter - View Single Post

February 22nd 05, 02:11 AM

wrote:

Alun L. Palmer wrote:

Mike Coslo wrote in
:

Alun L. Palmer wrote:

Mike Coslo wrote in
:

Alun L. Palmer wrote:

Mike Coslo wrote in
:

some snippage

I don't know if any of us geniuses have though about it, but
lets say
in a country where a business can get successfully sued for a
woman not knowing that here hot coffee was hot, and burning herself
when trying to hold the darn thing between her legs. (sorry Phil, but
what if she simply ruined her dress because the coffee was wet?-
negligent design of the cup?)

I wrote a lot of the stuff you are commenting on, Jim. It's a hazard of
us not trimming threads!

The case centered around the fact that the coffee was *extremely* and
unreasonably hot.

Ask 10 people, and you'll get ten different answers if that was the
question. I assume that anything in a styro cup is Hot, until I can
examine it.

So lets have a newbie ham that fires up his/her kilowatt
rig, and is half fried because no one told him not to touch the wirey
thingies on the back of the box thingy. Ohh, I can see the successful
lawsuits already!

So what?

There's no license required to operate houshold appliances, nor power
tools, which can be extremely dangerous. There's no skills test to pump your
own gasoline. Or to climb a ladder.

I've nailed myself with 50 watts, enough to produce a
painful burn and a cute little scar on the boo-boo finger. Some dunce that
catches a ride on a thousand watts might just have a very successful
lawsuit if we don't train them well.

Who are they going to sue?

The manufacturers of equipment, the VEC that administered the test. Find
some deep pockets and sue, sue, sue.

As a little example of the mindset, you might recall an accident along
I-80 last year, a few miles from my QTH. Huge horrible pileup, many
vehicles, many people killed, and a fiery mess that took a long time to
clean up. The accident was related to a snow squall that blew up
unexpectedly, and the excessive speed that the whole group was traveling
at. While no charges were filed against anyone at the time, the families
of the deceased are filing suit against the truck drivers *and* the
companies they worked for. Hopefully the trucking companies have a good
safety program.

And on what grounds, compared to other
electronic devices?

Most of my appliances have warnings on them of electric shock potential,
or of cutting, burning, whatever dangers also. There is a reason why
they are there.

Nobody can be protected completely from a lawsuit. But if you are sued,
you are well served to have forewarned potential litigation adversaries
of the possible dangers of the devices they may use.

RF Safety should be the FIRST order of the day, and NO one
should be a Ham until they are tested for RF safety to the ability to
handle full legal limit.

The reason for the RF safety questions is to prevent exposing *others*
to a hazard.

And the FCC has determined that the RF safety requirements of the
Tech test are adequate for hams who use up to 1500 W power output on
"meat-cooking frequencies".

And those who think that limiting the finals voltage, or
some other weird thing is the answer, are advised to think about things
such as Technician Hams operating under supervision. It only takes a
second to drop a paper and reach behind a Rig. Less time than the
control op can react. I want those Technicians to be exposed to full
power safety requirements. Anything else is criminally negligent.

But they are already tested on full-power requirements.

Yoiks! We're doing major time/subject shifting here, Jim! My comments
several iterations of the thread ago were in relation to possible
changing of test requirements, ala the W5YI proposal, where the
newcomers are given a much simpler test, and things that I consider
critically important, such as not having your hobby kill ya, would be
dropped from the testing.

Everyone may disagree, but that's too bad.

Rest snipped

- Mike KB3EIA -