Who likes Electronics and Electrical discussions?

Here on ATS we have a LOT of really smart people. I never cease to be impressed by people's knowledge here!

I work with a variety of electronic systems on a daily basis, everything from basic electronic components to things like high frequency RF and all manner of other communications and electronic systems. I also wind up having to work with electrical systems too (kind of goes with the territory), everything from high voltage and amperage DC systems as well as AC systems.

I love physics and all the sidelines which go with it as it relates to electrical, RF and optical systems.

Are there other folks here on ATS who like to discuss these things? I'll post more if people like it. Yes, I'm a bit of a dork in this respect, but I'm too old to care. I raise cows as an outlet for my madness. ...but I still have a fairly well fitted out bench down in my shop.

Love to discuss things like:
- Oscilloscopes
-Sig gens / function gens
-Power supplies
-Soldering ideas and techniques
-Circuit design
-Amplifiers (audio OR RF)
-Spectrum analysis
-Antenna design
-Basic electronics (and how to make it better)
-the list is endless

Sorry if this is boring. It's not to me.

All input appreciated, good or bad.

Thanks!

May the odds be ever in your favor!

I have spent my life as an electrical contractor, I’m not much help in electronics, but I can get by. I love problem solving so I’m in.

Good idea! I'm not well versed in electronics, but I did manage recently to drop a new gain pot into a British amp I had had for almost twenty years. That's after I had another British amp fixed (not cheap), recapped the preamp section...and then a few weeks ago, I fried the outputs doing something I knew better than to do. Win some, lose some.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

My brother is an electronic wiz....
Useless pretty much everywhere else.

My friend rebuilds the old tube type stereo equipment..

I only dabble with electronics.
My next project is a portable Bluetooth speaker.

You left out building speakers, one of my passions.

I have built amplifiers and all sorts of gear back in the day. These days you only need to build with pre-made modules. More of an assembly rather than a build.


P

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Count me in. I'm 70, cut my teeth on vacuum tubes and had to learn solid state components on my own. I haven't had to consult any replacement periodicals in 20 years, so I'm kinda rusty...

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I have 35 years of electronics experience specific to all ground based navigational aids used to stop planes from crashing into each other. Plus all of the associated test equipment. RATCALS stands for Radar, Air Traffic Control, and Landing Systems.

I have fixed a few electronic devices that go in my RC Helicopters and have some equipment, no oscilloscope or tone generators yet but have a solder rework station and a butane soldering iron for soldering anywhere, multimeters, DC amp clamp love that thing.

I have no schooling in electronics but simply can not stand not to be able to fix something.
For instance my mini vans needles in the dash cluster got to where they were flipping back and forth so hard that the RPM needle broke in half.

I took the cluster out and found that a leg on one part was broke and missing.
It was supposed to stick all the way through the PCB and solder to the back side. I fixed it by cutting a tiny piece of paper clip, putting it in the hole and resoldering it.
Also there were several other grounds on the PCB that had continuity to the same part that I repaired that apparently get hot enough to melt the solder to the point where they become ungrounded. Resoldered those as well with the magnifying glass they were tiny.

I can fix things if there is an obvious burned out part, something easy to find, I have a big magnifying glass to see tiny parts with. I was amazed watching a guy on youtube trace audio all the way through the board to the exact location where it quit working with a tone generator.
I watch a lot of electronic, CB and Ham youtubes and have built a few 11 meter antennas.

This is one amazing piece of equipment. This guy has designed and built.
Its a very sensitive Audio and RF non touch tracer.
He can hover it over parts in a radio and if audio is present it will come through on the speaker if its in that mode. Its does several things. Non touch though is an invaluable time saver because you don't have to have a schematic to contact each part along the path to find the noise or drop out.
It very quickly finds a noisy glitchy part. Its a long vid but to see it working FF to 52min30.


I had no idea you were into RF and electronics FCD. I thought you did beef cattle and hay and was a still out there mending fences type of guy.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

There used to be a column in the magazine Electronics Australia called "The Serviceman" and always had something funny or some difficult puzzle that came across the servicema's desk. I read them avidly as a youth.

Sadly, the column and magazine have 'gone away' and I haven't come across something similar online.

I'm sure there are others like me who like such things. Real life puzzles - and their solutions!

FCD, go to it! I already like your posts and down to earth writing style. I think the added capability of actually contributing in the solution of some of these things is an added plus!

Cheers from me

Anything to do with 2 channel audio..you know i'm interested, not that I'm filled with a lot of technical knowledge, but I know gear, and the differences between gear, tube, solid state..love speakers too, have some interesting ones.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Love it, just bought a new handheld optical/copper time domain reflectometer, when setup correctly can isolate faults through cables using pulses to within millimetres even on runs up to 2km. Even on copper with proper analysis of copper cables you can actually see how far along bends, opens, shorts etc are throughout entire cable runs. Absolute life saving piece of kit. My fusion splicer with ccd camera is also a nifty bit of tech.

I install, maintain and use just about every bit of kit on your list. Sad but true that it gets my juices flowing.

a reply to: ratcals

I also work in aviation, and aviation electronics. Have been for going on 35 years now. Mostly land based systems, but we do a bit of airborne systems. We support most ILS and Radar, and work on them as well. CAT I, II and even IIIC. (the list goes on). We do a lot of the new nextgen stuff now too, especially the new prox radars with analytics, and some of the new ASDE-X stuff is pretty cool.

High speed, low drag, man! Hoo-YAH!!

a reply to: Grenade

Gawd, I'd be lost without an OTDR / ETDR! Probably use one, or five, ever single day!! OTDR's especially!

Optical is where it's at for long haul with big data. Knowing your waveguide is priceless!

ETA - Just 2 km? Wow! We've got runs about 60km, and some even longer than that, but we don't own those. Use some big flame thrower lasers for those runs! Still works the same though. Big money gear, but I love gear...in fact, I'm kind of a gear head. Can't afford that stuff though. The lowly stuff on my list above is no issue though.

a reply to: pheonix358

Sound is one of the coolest things of all. It might be lower frequency, but you can hear it.

The rest is just voodoo and magic (well, that's what we say anyway). Can't hear it, can't see it, can't feel it...throw some chicken bones at it and it will change frequencies or attenuation.

Sound propagation is something I really dig, and speaker design is some serious physics!!! No joke there! That's some really hard stuff! Anyone can build a "speaker", but very few can build a really, really, good speaker!!

I'm a hardcore speaker nut, and I have some favs, but the other day I was looking online at a set of home audio speakers which were $244,000...EACH!! I'm a big Kipsch guy (wish I would have never sold my LaScala's). If I could only be so good!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Tell me about it. Just run and spliced om3 fibres between cabs throughout entire estate of a large supermarket chain here in the UK. When I say I what I actually mean is sub-contractors, apprentices and trainees under my instruction. I’m more the guy that gets sent out to figure out what they’ve done wrong.

a reply to: Grenade

Just be glad you're working with all digital data stuff! A lot of the stuff we have to do is with high frequency analog signals, so we wind up having to do a lot of angled face stuff (APC's). Talk about testing failures! Even trying to explain return loss to most tech's is like trying to explain relativity. Not even splicing is easy with low return loss specs.

Tell one of your tech's sometime their return loss is too high...and watch their face as they digest that!

(How can my return "loss" be too 'high'????? How is that even possible???) Their skull will implode! LOL!!

Note - I still have to sit and think about that concept sometimes.

I've used tone generators and oscilloscopes, but I am probably way too rusty to be any use.

I remember in AIT (army),,, way back in 87....towards the end, I had a bright idea....

My question to the instructor was....when you use a pay phone and the operator had to refund you money...how do they the do that...electrical didn't seem feasible to me so I came up with the idea that it was tones that told the phone how much to refund..so in theory I could hook up a tone generator and cycle through tones until the phone paid out. Never got a chance to try it, pay phones were well on their way out by that time.

On the last day of training, the instructor walked around the class and told each person how he thought they would do once they got to their first duty assignment...when he got to my desk, he just looked at me and said..oh yeah..the pay phone guy...you're probably going to go to jail. LOL

We were always told that if anybody asked what we did in the military, our response would be....we observe and monitor electrical phenomena.

Man that brings back a lot of forgotten memories. We trained on analog circuits, but even then things were switching to digital. I believe if I am not mistaken that the standard back then for trouble shooting analog circuits was 1024Hz at -10db. We used Fireberds for the digital side running a bit error rate test.

I'm an electronics technician. Not as good at theory as I'd like to be, but I do have a keen interest.

Right now my life is consumed with the Hellenistic and Roman worlds and don't have time for electricity.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I’m assuming you mean the return loss doesn’t match desired VSWR? The idea of too much return loss is making my head implode. Surely the goal is infinite return loss which would mean 100% power transmission and zero insertion loss? ( I realise this is fantasy in the real world ).

As for spicing, if you have a well maintained and good quality stripper, cleaver and splicer it makes all the difference. A steady hand and good eyesight helps.

Heya FCD, electronics is a indeed great topic for discussion.

I built a Helium Neon LASER when I was 19, not the tube part but the ready to go components. I even made the AC plug-in cord with smallish gauge wire since it only pulled milliamps to fire it up. I went on to take electronics engineering, but couldn't finish because of financial trouble part way through it which is a big disappointment.

Still love electronics and have worked for a few places that build prototype electronics packages.

The last one we made a small device that was installed along the high transmission lines power lines in southern BC Canada (BC Hydro) so they could detect when illegal hemp growers were stealing their power put in the middle of nowhere. They were using some kind of device to leech power on the ground just below the power lines. Induction devices I think.

The detectors had GPS chips and Cell phone chip that would SMS them lat.& long. when it detected a drop. then they would send the RCMP to go get it.

I don't work in that field now. I have a few different trades to rely on that I am more experienced at.