Electronics newb (kinda)

Excellent !bob

Welcome to the group. We hope to learn a lot from you. :)

--Winston

Welcome. Dumb questions are not dumb to the person who wants an answer. I have seen your nic before but can't remember where.

Tom

The math really isn't all that difficult. Basic algebra is about all that is necessary.

And there are a few handy formulas to remember, thigns like Ohm's law, and maybe Kirchoff's law among others.

If you want to do RF, I strongly suggest getting your amateur radio ticket and buying the study guides from the ARRL. You'll love learnign about the various oscillators (Hartley, Colpitts and then you'll learn about phase angles and all sort of fun stuff.

The Arduino platform will get you thinking though. You can do all sorts of things with it.

What math? Yes it's there, and one way to describe things, but a lot of things can be taught without math. And oddly, the one thing that has changed in forty years is that math for practical reasons, such as figuring out the proper value of a resistor to bias a transistor, is just a matter of having the formula and putting it in a calculator with some values. In the old days, that sort of math was often missing from the mainstream books (you'd have to get other books for that, at least in hobby circles), because it required too much from the reader, in the days before calculators.

Michael

I guess I wasn't dedicated enough, plus mechanics has always > come natural to me. I finally did work my way into a

A fact I learned when I weaseled my way into the electro-mechanical field. Prior, my forte was high vacuum, which got me into the module test dept. With much previous experience in soldering and assy of cables/wiring/termination, and a passing knowledge of omns law, I began to learn computers and elec/mech circuit troubleshooting. I gained a lot of practical knowledge in those days.

Boy, howdy! My fist exposure was in the service, correspondence classes in electronics. While I had a good grasp of algebra, I never learned to find square root by long division (the slipstick days). Whew. And a simple LED 4-5 function calculator (what you now get in a box of cereal for free!) were jes hitting the market at $400-500 ea. This correspondence course was ALL theory and math oriented. Nary a resitor or wire or battery to be found. I burned out, quickly.

I tried again, much later in jr college, but that course was just as weird. By my second semester, I found myself sitting in front of an oscillascope, but had yet to learn even Kirchoff's law or fully understand an RLC circuit.

Now, with the internet in full bloom, the world is my oyster. I can pick and choose the things I need to learn or may be fuzzy on and go to a zillion sources to find out any little thing. If I don't learn from one webpage cuz the material is presented a bit too dry or without enough graphics fer my pea brain, I can find 20 other better pages, with everything from gif graphics to java to flash to full on youtube videos. Brilliant! Learning has never been easier and fun.

Plus, online, there's whole communities of like minded folks, young and old, rabid to help poor poor pitiful me. How cool is that!? ;)

nb

Likewise. Your last name rings a bell.

I learned about usenet early and have always preferred it to forums. I've posted over 25K articles on usenet in the last 10 yrs, everthing from BBQ, beer brewing, guns, computers, to wrenching motorcycles and playing guitar. No doubt we've crossed paths more than once. ;)

nb

Zen Buddhism?

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

Do you think he got it Fred:-)

Yeah.... though I am running low on incense. ;)

nb

I have some. Be Here Now. :)

--Winston