Just to set the record straight,
@Randomblame has no vested interest in these boards, so he's not trying to make excuses or anything to promote them. I can't speak for him, but I do know where he is coming from: we were told not to expect super-high results from goniometer testing as the tester would not be "gilding the lily" so to speak.
In other words, he believed some manufacturers deliberately inflated their results (sometimes by testing LEDs when cold), while other sphere testing was not fully accurate depending on the age and type of the equipment used and when it had been calibrated etc. And there
are atmospheric losses depending on how far away the light source is - though I'm not going to speculate how much (or little) difference that makes in tests such as these.
Again, I can't speak for the tester, as he's not here to defend himself! What I do know is, it's not so much the umol/j results he was interested in, as producing an IES file that we could use to PAR map our boards.
Look, it's a bit like having a musclecar and taking it down to the local dyno tuner. There are "happy" dynos and there are "grumpy" dynos. They are all meant to be calibrated, but obviously "happy" dynos give car owners higher horsepower figures than "grumpy" dynos. This makes customers happy . . . until they run their cars down the quarter mile and discover their "450hp" engine is really only making 400hp based on elapsed times and trap speeds.
The only way to compare two cars is to run them down the 1/4 mile, or put them on the same dyno. Forget about the total figures, it's the comparison that counts.
Anyway, back to Mr Randomblame. These boards we designed and put together by a few growers (myself included) and Randomblame was part of the process. We bounced ideas off each other and discussed what we thought would work and why. We talked about features that growers would find useful, and we confined our discussions to developing a pure flowering board with no compromises.
Once the design was finished, LEDs were bought, PCBs were commissioned and assembly went ahead in Australia. An initial run was made to supply all those who were interested - all the growers who were involved - but of course you can't just make a few dozen boards as you have to buy LEDs in reels of 5000 and PCBs are cheaper the more you produce etc.
So we made 96 boards, and obviously there were boards leftover. Randomblame isn't here trying to spruik those boards. They will sell, and we will recover our costs and all of us will have some nice flowering boards to grow with. You will start to see results soon enough.
This whole exercise was not about starting a new business venture, but to produce something we wanted but couldn't find anywhere else.
Having said that, we have received a lot of positive feedback, and most of the boards have now sold. If there is demand, then it's no stretch for us to produce some more boards. If that happens, then it starts becoming a business venture and we have to start looking at whether we want that responsibility or not!
Right now, I'm just sharing the results of what we've done, and enjoying taking about the reasons why we did what we did, such as adding a UV-based white phosphor LED and CRI98 LED to tune the spectrum, and an efficient CRI90 LED to drive the main output.
I get what you're saying - in an ideal world, goniometer and sphere testing should produce the same results - but perhaps that's not always the case. But I'm not qualified to say one way or the other.
) and I actually paid and shipped him 2 of the Aussie HL boards as thanks to him for all the hard work he did for everybody mapping the 96Elite engines and answering everyone's incessant questions about the 96s - this is a true story bro!
