They are called factory authorized service locations, and they are still around. Just a lot less HV is involved now. A lot less magnetics too, since LCD and plasma displays don't require deflection coils.
A Catholic High School? I hope she doesn't take it too hard when she goes to college and finds out that the world is older than 6000 years by many orders of magnitude.
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Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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"The beauty of a chainsaw is that you don\'t have to start it. Just
show up with it." - Joe Walsh, on checking in to hotels
What do you have against robotics? Just that a lot of people into them are primarily slapping together hardware using off-the-shelf RC components and controllers and not actually doing electronics design? Or something else?
I attended the OSU engineering expo last Friday. Lots of interesting stuff... and they're pushing "TekBots" (guess who sponsors it) in a big way these days...
I've always thought that leaving out phasors in 2-year programs is something of a disservice to students: All the machinations you have to go through to do use R/L/C's without introducing 'j' seems a lot worse than spending the week or so on, "Remember that sqrt(-1) thing you learned in high school? Here's an actual application for it! Yes, it's somewhat abstract and seemingly magical at first, but you'll like it, trust me! And you'll find your contemporary calculator is perfectly happy to operate using these things..."
Not that it belongs in a 2-year program, but phasors also serve as a very nice "backdrop" to Laplace transforms... they're a lot less nebulous when you can tell kids, "Hey, you've been using a somewhat distilled version of this for a year or two now..."
Sure one does. I managed to stump the department head on the equation for GBW in an op-amp circuit (I didn't know what the correct answer was, but I was able to demonstrate that the "solution" up on the board was incorrect and the department head agreed but also didn't know where to go from there :-) ).
A better story is the one I've posted previously about a co-worker who took a control systems lab and, after being unable to get the lab to achieve some specified settling time was able to demonstrate that doing so was impossible given the bandwidth limitations of the the power amplifier and op-amps provided. Since he'd just demonstrated that hundreds of kids had dry-labed the experiment, his story goes that the next day a half-dozen department professors were in the lab trying to get it to work, and they concluded the same thing my co-worker had: It couldn't be done with the equipment provided. The lab itself had been constructed by some former grad. student!
Jim has his story about demonstrating that someone had minimized an op-amp's sensitivity with respect to one variable while making the rest atrocious, which is the kind of thing you'd only see in academia. I'm sure he has plenty more too...
I was 9 units into a MSEE program at Sac State when I had the department chair try and convince me that his microstrip circuit on alumina 1/4 inch thick would work. Get alumina more than 10 or 20 mils thick at 10 GHz. or so and I don't care HOW much you wish it would work, it ain't gonna.
I found the fault on a tube radio once with a screwdriver and a pair of needle nose pliers - in under 2 minutes (open WW resistor on the multiple electro).
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Beginner\'s luck?
I found the fault once, in a radio, by isolating the fault down, on
the schematic, to a 10K resistor and then licking my fingers and
bridging the resistor with those fingers. The radio started
playing, I replaced the resistor and, AFAIK, it\'s still out there
working like it\'s supposed to.
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