hobby electronics

IMHO the term "hobby electronics" used to mean "soldering up radios" but now means "jumper wiring modules". Arduino, RPi, and ESP32 have made it trivial for anyone to wire up sensors and actuators.

Where used to be a niche talent (designing transistors or ICs) has moved up the tree (designing modules) with the corresponding dearth of interested applicants.

One can only hope that easy access to PCB manufacturing and assembly services will make the niche talents more popular.

Send your hunting teams out to radio amateur meetings. Bring nets.

Joe Gwinn

Is there still ham radio? Internet, cell phones, email, games, texting, and free long-distance seems to have killed that.

I plan to explore the local maker spaces, hoping to find kids who like real electronics, or at least can program Raspberry Pi at low level.

No, amateur radio is still alive. Not as build it yourself as it once was but they are still out there and experimenting.

I have been part of some STEM demonstrations and STEM science fairs where the young people of today, the old people of tomorrow, are impressionable and interested I think. They REALLY like Jacob's ladders ! They also seemed to like playing with the soldering iron and trying to make connections which was also part of my STEM table.

Yeah, it's not the same as it was when we were growing up but I think you just have to find the right ones and mentor them. Some might even stay on the one job and want to learn more and actually be useful to your/my company.

boB

There is, but it's graying to be sure.

Most of the deep-dyed RF engineers I work with are hams. They also attend SciFi cosplay conventions.

.

Probably will be mostly robot makers - RF is so ... technical ...

Joe Gwinn

Am 02.07.24 um 20:27 schrieb Jan Panteltje:

I do not like the board material. Using perf board does not mean you have to give up acceptable ground.

Board material with ground mesh is from

There is even nicer material from Vero, but it costs > 10 dB more.

BTW this is a single sided version of Win's ribbon micro preamp with 70 pV rthz noise as shown in W & H's AOE3. Works as promised.

Has anybody here heard of Win recently?

cheers, Gerhard DK4XP

Am 02.07.24 um 20:06 schrieb john larkin:

.... and that just 2 days after the local HamRadio 2024 exhibition with > 11000 visitors in Friedrichshafen where Austria, Switzerland and Germany touch.

There was a pro contact market, too, and exhibitors like R&S and Rigol..

cheers, Gerhard

Go to any ham rally and you'll be lucky to find anyone under 50 nowadays. You'll find plenty of people over 70, though! Not what you're looking for obviously, but it's the sad truth.

When PCs became affordable thanks to the likes of Sinclair with his ZX80/81, Spectrum etc., an awful lot of kids who would have ventured into electronics and radio ended up being seduced into the digital world and never looked back. That's a big factor here, too.

When I lived there the Conrad shops were very good for discretes and way better than their UK equivalent, Maplin - or even Tandy/Radio Shack for that matter. I'm guessing they've probably cut right back on the discretes by now though. :(

Adapters with wire isn't difficult.

Haven't heard from H or H in ages.

I need a microvolt precise unity-gain follower with nV and fA noise and low bias current, but no opamp like that exists, and jfets are too drifty.

AD8675 is about the closest I can find.

And one can get an EE degree now without learning much about electricity. And I suspect that the big IC companies scoop up the few that do.

Last weekend was Field Day here in the USA. It was a very hot, cloudless day in my town and too much direct sunlight overheated the club's ham radio spectrum analyzer.

Danke,

Correction. The weekend before last was Field Day here in the USA. It was a very hot, cloudless day in my town and too much direct sunlight overheated the club's ham radio spectrum analyzer.

Danke,

Am 03.07.24 um 00:41 schrieb Cursitor Doom:

They did cut back... but the number of Conrad shops. All but one. The rest is online biz only.

Cheers, Gerhard

If you temperature stabilised your junction FET to a milli-degree or so, it would be less drifty.

There are monolithic dual junction FETs

Am 03.07.24 um 00:42 schrieb john larkin:

From subcircuits that have shown some value I tend to make stamp sized boards, like the *10 *10 ADA4898-2 post amplifier at the right in the ribbon preamp. My 1h laser printer to solder home etching process helps.

s.e.d. used to be a nice place back then!

I have played with Bob Widlar's bipolar super-beta voltage follower. It looks quite promising. Where else do you get gain = 1.000 just so? Noise density is OK, too. More transistors seem not to help any further. More current, yes. Q4 and Q5 are just parking lots.

It would be interesting how a LM108 on today's hot processes would look like.

I'm typing-challenged because I hurt my right shoulder yesterday :-(

cheers, Gerhard

There are still a few, but it has become a very minority interest today. Partly because everything is so heavily integrated and surface mount.

When I grew up you could get dead ICL 1900 boards full of TTL chips for and bags dross coated transistors at start of line for pennies. Today there is no equivalent source of cheap easily reused parts.

Back then there were also electronic kits for build your own computer etc.

A lot of it today is plugging new mass produced modules together. Raspberry Pi has done a lot for that and to encourage electronics hobbyists though so it isn't all bad news.

Surface mount has rendered modern kit all but impossible for the home user to repair. I cut my teeth mending transistor car radios back when chassis earth was chosen randomly by each car manufacturer to be either positive or negative and people blew up their brand new car radios.

The other big earner was mending teenage wannabe rock stars amplifiers that had their output transistors fried or a pint of beer in them.

Go looking at maker-spaces or whatever they are called in the US. Most of them will be trying to make electric guitars but they will be showing at least some skills with small pickup coils and low noise amplifiers.

Back in my day a lot of our physics practicals were essentially electronics based - characteristics of a FET, various oscillators and a substantial digital electronics and logic course with a finishing test of making a digital dice (it may still be the same course even now).

I'm pretty sure the previous generation did the same experiments on thermionic valves and relays but that was discontinued on H&S grounds.

Sure there is. Digikey, for one. Larger SMT parts such as SOICs can be used dead bug style, and there are still lots of DIP packages around, especially the older parts that are good for hacking around with.

Smaller SMTs can be put on little breakouts (sold for cheap by, e. g. Bellin, via Newark/Farnell) and mounted on Cu-clad with foam double sticky tape.

It’s harder for a beginner to figure all that out on his own, but I would have made a lot faster progress than I did, what with a loopstick coil costing a week‘s pocket money.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yes but far too late to be much use. Since Brexit there is even less teaching of modern languages. English people have now become as lazy as Americans and so expect everyone to speak English. My 1970's state secondary school had a language lab with tape recorders and headsets for everybody and taught French, German, Spanish, Greek & Latin.

Everybody did French at first. Those that had done it at primary school had a massive head start which we never regained. If you were any good at it you could choose Latin or Greek. I chose Latin. I found I was much better at ancient languages that didn't require speaking them!

Most educated Dutch or Swiss people I have encountered are fluent in at least three languages. I had one intern from U Twente who was brilliant.

I learned some Russian at university too (for reading scientific papers) and then later Japanese by immersion in Japan. In Belgium my Flemish was just about good enough to get by - my wife's was better.