HackRF is designed to be test equipment rather than a legal radio transceiver. It doesn't meet the FCC specifications for spectral purity, especially when amplified. You could probably make filters to help it produce a legal output.

Whitebox is meant to meet FCC specifications for spurious signals that are required when amplification of 25 watts or higher is used. Amplifiers also contribute spurious signals and will usually incorporate their own filters.

HackRF is something that sticks on your laptop via USB. Whitebox is meant to be a stand-alone system or one that is controlled from your Smartphone via a WiFi or Bluetooth link.

Whitebox is optimized for battery power. Using a FLASH-based gate-array rather than the conventional SRAM one makes a big difference.

HackRF is designed to be test equipment rather than a legal radio transceiver. It doesn't meet the FCC specifications for spectral purity, especially when amplified. You could probably make filters to help it produce a legal output.

Whitebox is meant to meet FCC specifications for spurious signals that are required when amplification of 25 watts or higher is used. Amplifiers also contribute spurious signals and will usually incorporate their own filters.

HackRF is something that sticks on your laptop via USB. Whitebox is meant to be a stand-alone system or one that is controlled from your Smartphone via a WiFi or Bluetooth link.

Whitebox is optimized for battery power. Using a FLASH-based gate-array rather than the conventional SRAM one makes a big difference.

Oh sure. And I could solder with Mercury, and that has a really low melting point :-). I imagine the application for a solder with a 160F melting point is very specialized. I don't ever want to specify a transportation temperature limit for consumer electronics of 160F, a freight container can exceed that.

Drilling holes in a multi-layer board is liable to nail a trace you can't see. If you are lucky you can shine a really bright light through it and see all of the traces. If you can't, don't try drilling.

Eutetic solder (the old non-RoHS stuff with lead in it) melts at 361 F, everything else in common use melts at a higher temperature.

Guys fron San Quentin once attempted an escape with a makeshift canoe painted with the legend "Rub a Dub Dub, Marin Yacht Club!". It sunk and they were re-imprisoned.

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

You mean it drops off too high and downrange to boost back to the launch point and too low to achieve most of one orbit before boosting back to the launch point. Right?

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

• Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
• Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
• Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
• Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
• This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.

One of the definitions I found was:

One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle.

I am sure that fits. While SpaceShip II is mainly intended for a non-exploration purpose, the program has resulted in some significant advances in rocketry and White Knight II has significant non-tourism use. These pilots have been involved in other space efforts, I remember the one who was injured from the Rotary Rocket test flights. There are lots of safer ways for these folks to make as much money as a test pilot is paid. They do what they do to advance our progress in aeronautics and space.

Martyrs? Who killed them for their beliefs?

Go away, troll. They certainly died while pursuing something intensely important that they were willing to risk their lives for. The fact that you weren't around to pull the trigger makes them no less martyrs.

Florian, I was anything but wrong about you! Look at all of that self-justifying blather!

Anyway, I have better uses of my time than to waste another minute with you.

I'm really not interested in hearing from you any longer. It's very clear that we'll never agree on anything, and the fact is I don't consider you someone whose opinion I value or who is worthy of any of my time.