On Tuesday 18 September 2018 15:12:52 Nicholas Geovanis wrote: > Go In Peace. > Real radio engineering, despite everything, is a dying art/science.
Yes, its got so bad the ma & pa small town broadcaster has to call in a factory engineer to keep them on the air. The days of the likes of Chester Simpson, Elmer Nelson, and me are about finished. One day after I had been the CE at WDTV for about 3 years, '87 I think the local school sent up a couple bussloads of 8th graders, spring break I guess, and I got volunteered to give them the $5 tour, explaining how tv worked from our end. Getting to the end where I'd turned on the cameras and monitors in the news studio and let them all "see themselves" on tv, I wrapped up my speech by saying that someday I'll retire, and that I hoped I had several of them nipping at my heels wanting a pretty good job. Blew me away, that was the best standup comedy they had heard in quite a while. "who would want a job like yours?" Thats when I understood 2 things, first that our educational system was well and truly broken if it wasn't making the technology of the day interesting enough, and that when I did retire, my replacement would need years of care and feeding before he would be ready to do what I'd been doing since 1964. I had him as an assistant for 5 or 6 years. It wasn't enough. Now you know why my posts occasionally end with a sigh... > Check out the Crystal Set Society, my man. > Real Men, Real Women, Real Radios. > https://www.midnightscience.net/ Chuckle. My last crystal set was in '47. Worked pretty good too. But when I took a room in Des Moines in 1951 so I'd be within walking distance of my job as the service tech at A.A.Schneiderhahn Co., fixing the zenith stuff the dealers couldn't fix for Iowa and the north half of Missouri, mother took the chance and cleaned out my old bedroom of everything but the bed & dresser. Fairly new house I'd helped my stepfather build right after the war, and I'm the one who wired it, at 13 yo. I stopped in my old home town and visited that house in the fall of 2007, one my way home from saying goodbye to my oldest daughter who was dying of cancer, and did within a week, and my fuse box and wiring had finally been replaced during a remodel in 2005. And once again, way off topic... -- Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>