NA noob's oobe and questions (starting up the learning curve)

[Robert.Wall]

@Grape

had to unzip the download first

No you didn’t. Etcher accepts either. From the Forum Discussion thread linked from the Docs entry for Etcher:

Using Etcher tool to flash emonSD image to SD card

It is worth noting that Etcher can use the downloaded zip file directly. It is not necessary to extract the image first.