If Don did a lot of aerospace design, he may have grounded things to the
front panel as a natural continuation of one of the standard aerospace
grounding architectures. A common architecture is to have a single point
ground on the aircraft structure somewhere, with every avionics unit's
primary power return wire tied to this single point ground. Then each unit
has its chassis tied to structure, but only its secondary grounds tied to
its own chassis. This way there is isolation between "primary" and
"secondary" power returns, and any noise created in the units does not get
carried back to the power supply and propagated to other units. On the
other hand, he may have had no clue about grounding architectures and
followed the other extreme which was to tie ALL grounds together in hopes
something good will happen.
At 01:14 AM 6/7/2003, Paul Schreiber wrote:
>...What is really disappointing is Don used the same Moog 'trick' of using
>the front panel as a
>ground. This was to "save labor" but really all it does is make for a
>noisy system. There is
>already lots and lots of point-to-point panel wiring, why adding 1 buss
>wire and a solid ground
>caused concern is beyond me....