Over the years I look back on my involvement in electronics. Initially it was a hobby, then as I progressed through college now its a fun and decent way to make a living. I don't do as much hobby work as I used to since I basically do electronics all day now. This post is a brief autobiography covering 1984 to 1990. During that time I worked on analog kits, radios, televisions, consumer electronics and even a Donkey Kong.
My dad was the key founder of my electronics hobby. If you read my Bio he gave me a book in 1979 and built a crystal radio that I listened to the local AM radio station on. Then I moved onto spring-clip electronics kits and a "Science Fair" electronics kit. I would go to garage sales on my bicycle buy up hobby kits, then order replacement parts from radio shack and then wire away. I would then do all the experiments if there was a guide. Afterward I would connect the kits together with a bunch of telephone wire I picked up when they did a splice nearby. I could make an AM radio that could actually drive a speaker at a decent volume. AM stations were not as horrible as they are today and we could listen to AM for hours on a 9V battery.
My twin brother Tim and our friends were key helpers into getting into the electronics hobby. My electronics buddies Rich M the digital guy, Aaron S the tube guy and David B the robot builder. Rich M taught me to solder when I was 10 years old, he was 11 at the time in 1980. In 1982 I saved my money and bought a kit for a home-built Radio Shack
analog volt meter 25KOhm/volt. The volt meter kit was a huge leap in terms
of making real measurements. (That "kit" volt meter was stolen years later during a Tubes concert at the Phoenix Theater. Aaron S. bought me a DVM to replace it.) Our geeky group didn't fully assemble until 1982 in high-school when I met Aaron S. Aaron had a truck and a drivers license, he was the slightly-older guy in the bunch
and had some tech school training in electronics with generally good
technique and a fantastic memory. Aaron was a huge help and one of our favorite things to do was taking apart and stressing electronic items with our friends. We would go to a thrift store and buy items cheap. The TVs back then were tube or tube-transistor hybrids. You could fix TVs by purchasing a bunch and a tube manual helps. Then would would repair and sell off the good TVs this was around 1984-87. Sometimes we would get an old 5-tube AM radio with a bad cap or a transistor set with a bad power supply we couldn't find a replacement for. These radios would be crushed and stripped for parts. Selenium rectifiers were shorted and overloaded (stinky). Sometimes fireworks, automobiles and baseball bats were involved. Reading resistor color codes became habit for scavenging. There were those countless hours with the soldering iron soldering lights on robots with Dave B. Those old parts were the source of some fun times. We did a lot of electronic component testing at 120V AC. Don't try that at home. Mostly the parts just piled up. In hindsight only smaller fraction was used for repair or real projects.
The Sony Walkman was very popular back then along with "boom boxes" it was the early 80s. These were a great source of income for me back then. The headphone jack would get loose or the wire would come off the magnetic head that reads the tape. Also the head would go out of alignment or the battery contact would fall off. Knobs and antennas get broken from boom boxes. I have lost track of how many. In 1985 120VAC to 12V DC power supplies were expensive so I used surplus store components to built them for me and friends at cost or for a beer. I called my 12V 10A supply "Nuke". We would use them to run CB radios, car stereos and DC motors.
Radio Shack was a huge source of parts boy I loved that place before 2000. I would spend my money on their books "The Engineer's Notebook" and "555 Timer IC Circuits" and Bipolar design. Me and my electronics buddy Rich would build the circuits on breadboards. Most of the circuits in the books could be made from cheap components hanging on the wall at Radio Shack. We would also buy old "unrepairable" electronics, customer returns and phased out components from Radio shack. They had turntables, amplifiers and toys. Even Tandy's "Surprise Boxes" where I got some great stuff like a stepper motor. My favorite was the stereo amplifier since I like analog audio. Often they had the schematic available and they were not too hard to debug. All you did was to "look for the smokey spot" and then rebuild the circuitry around it. If one channel worked, you could debug the other by comparing DC voltages. During that time period I didn't understand why the schematic looked like it did, I could debug it by comparison. It was always a battle of lack-of information or lack of knowledge (about feedback-stability theory) yet forging on ahead in the debug a by checking connections and keeping notes with observations. Fortunately the circuits were mostly constructed from discrete components with very few integrated circuits. Thru-hole resistors and capacitors were much bigger than today's more popular surface mount components. The older technology help to made learning to debug easier than today.
Around 1987-88 I did some video game repair on some now infamous stand up consoles. It was pretty common for the game "TV" monitor degaus circuit to blow up and take down the monitor. The two machines I saw this on were Donkey Kong Jr and a Donkey Kong. All the parts could be ordered from MCM Electronics. A local movie theater owner discovered I could repair electronics and had me work on those games. The Donkey Kong deal was quick it was back in the theater right away after I fixed a bad thermistor. As for the Junior machine that sat in the garage for a couple months. We had it out in the garage and set it to free play and the locals loved it. It was a sad day for everyone when Dave the theater owner paid up and took away the game.
In 1990 I completed my BSEE at UC Davis and things changed on the hobby front. At the end of the BSEE I was spending time in well outfitted labs, with loads of "free" components and real test equipment. There were profs and TAs that could explain things and give you help if needed. Some of those TAs encouraged me to branch out and make money from doing repair in Sacramento. My home setup of breadboards no longer looked as appealing as my proto-board with an oscilloscope attached on a bench at UCD. The group from the high-school analog days had pretty much gone their ways. I have never lost contact with Rich M who went on to get a degree in computer science at SSU. The completion of my BSEE ended what I call the "just for fun" period and I got more business minded. Debugging automated laundry mats and recording studios repairs were next while I worked on my MSEE, the subject of a future post.
