[UDUNITS #IEB-391154]: Unit for 'bell' in udunits2-common.xml

Sander,

> Ok. Thanks for the clarification.
> Do you perhaps have one or more references that would show that (d)BW  is 
> indeed a common symbolic abbreviation for 'bell' based on Watts? This would 
> help me gain support of some colleagues who may still insist on using dB (and 
> not caring about the reference level, because e.g. it is fixed within their 
> domain) to actually move towards using dBW.

I looked for the rational behind the "BW", "Bm", and "BuW" units but couldn't 
find anything. As I recall, I added them at the request of an electrical 
engineer.

I note that the NIST site explicitly derogates such units because they attach 
ancillary information to unit symbols.

Thinking about this, I think what's needed in the UDUNITS-2 package is a new 
class of unit: an unreferenced logarithmic unit. This class would allow 
conversion of values between unreferenced logarithmic units and the use of the 
unit specifications like "dB". It would disallow conversion between 
unreferenced logarithmic units and any other type of unit.

I'll add this to the backlog for the package. Thanks for forcing me to think 
about it.

> Since the tool where we use udunits is limited to a specific domain anyway, 
> for our purposes we won't have to convert between dB and some other unit. The 
> usage will be limited to dealing with linear scaling and making sure that 
> quantities are 'the same' in order to prevent invalid operations.
> But I do appreciate the clean approach that has been taken for udunits, so I 
> will try to see if we can move towards using dBW.
> 
> Best regards,
> Sander 


Regards,
Steve Emmerson

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: IEB-391154
Department: Support UDUNITS
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed