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ablomov
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20 Aug 2008, 2:48 am

Anyone do this stuff nowadays?

Simple short wave trf receivers were always a thrill. Forty years ago - from eight to sixteenyears old i was fascinated with the 'look' of electronic components - even struggled getting circuit theory into my head- I'm not very bright and money was hard to come by. I shd have trained to be a technician. My Dad was obsessed with me becoming a 'fitter and turner'. To him even serving an apprenticeship was a big thing. Blimey.......



Last edited by ablomov on 22 Aug 2008, 12:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

n4mwd
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20 Aug 2008, 4:45 am

You need to buy an electronic kit and put it together. Some are just simple things and some are quite involved. Heathkit used to have a lot of great stuff, but they went under.

Kits are usually more expensive than just buying stuff, but its the education that you are paying for.

http://www.elecraft.com/KX1/KX1.htm



gamefreak
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20 Aug 2008, 5:05 am

You can take a course at a local technical institution.



coyote
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20 Aug 2008, 7:01 am

I agree with kits beeing a very good hands-on introduction. Have a look at:

http://www.vellemanusa.com/us/enu/engine.php

But soldering components rapidly gets boring if you don't know what you're doing and only assembling the pieces as on the plan.... in this case, your kit is nothing else than a lego. You want some theory of circuits, Wiki is excellent as usual, and you always have coyote from WP you can ask questions to ;)



Johnny_Monolith
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20 Aug 2008, 11:43 am

Soldering is fun if you have a kit or you have a circuit that's designed and you know exactly what you want.

If you want to change things up and experiment with new designs or whatever, making a breadboard circuit or a wire-wrapped prototype is (for me) even more fun and you are less likely to burn yourself.

Also if you ever want to design something or even play around with microcontrollers or simple robotics, Dallas Semiconductor (www.maxim-ic.com) is very good about providing free samples for most of their pieces.



Wisguy
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22 Aug 2008, 12:21 am

Another option is to go seriously 'retro' and find an unrestored antique broadcast radio that uses vacuum tubes and restore it to working condition. Such work usually involves removing and replacing many point-to-point wired internal parts, mainly capacitors (LOTS of soldering), and will likely result in a receiver that makes AM radio sound really good again. (The people in 'tube' days had it very good indeed when it came to the overall sound and reception quality of their most basic consumer electronics!) There are MANY excellent on-line resources available to get one going in this fascinating area.

Mike



ablomov
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22 Aug 2008, 3:10 am

You've all completely missed my point!

I'm talking abt what u did years back as a kid.

Kits! U gotta be joking. As a kid I had to money garden to even buy some simple r's and c's. Don't like kits - they always smack of 'being too easy'. If I had even dared get a Heathkit catalogue my Dad wld have gone MAD. In the UK we had a good wireless construction mag and more than enough info to get energised. Kits - make me laugh. At fourteen I had built my own tilt over tower and could use my Dads engineering lathe, screwcut with setting up changewheels etc. - but not all at the same moment in time! The only communications rx was an old ex-army tank set given to me by a visiting callsign, he must have been baffled by my Dads stinginess. Yet here was a kid keen to learn!!

The question I am asking is abt years ago getting involved with veroboard, making inductors, sn74oo's, metalwork, making your own slo mo tuning mechanisms, etc. Kept me busy till I went into digs at seventeen.