"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" fired this volley in
:

One could tell you exactly how something
was SUPPOSED to work, but was absolutely useless in the shop.

I have to disagree with that. I ran a maintenance depot for a large
regional computer firm. ANY day, give me a tech who understands
electronic theory (even without any technical "hands-on" experience) over
one who has _only_ had field experience.

With the first, I can train, teach, coax, and even coerce practical
knowlege into, and the process will involve epiphanies of recognition as
he/she ties the theoretical into the practical.

Almost all of the "hands-on-only" techs I've hired were reasonably
competent, perfectly capable of fixing almost everything they'd ever seen
before, and worth their salt in the field -- but few could "make the
leap" intellectually between a new problem, and the reason it existed or
the method to solve it.

I, too, learned electronics starting at age ten, when I joined "The
American Basic Science Club" through an ad in Popular Science. I started
out "hands-on", but got the formal training, too. I even taught my Dad
enough about it that HE went to electronics school, ended up teaching
there eventually, and he and I opened a TV/Radio repair business (back in
the day when they were both repairable and worth repairing).

But no... give me a tech who understands theory every time over one who
does not.


You're welcome to them. I had better luck teaching the second group,
because the degreed types were insulted that someone dared tell them how
something worked, or how to fix it. The first step in teaching is
having a student who wants to learn. If you don't have that they aren't
going to learn anything useful.

I was working in a TV shop at 13, even though I still had a lot to
learn. I was still able to diagnose most problems without help, but a
few times I needed help to find a simpler way to do the actual repair.
For instance, I was taught to remove the PC board from the early Delco
AM solid state radios and use a bunch of jumpers to reconnect the coils
in the tuner to the board. that took an extra 10 minutes per radio, and
quite often the terminals on the coils would break while being
deoldered. I quickly discovered that a pair of curved hemostats would
let me put a new part into the proper holes under the cast aluminum
body, even though you couldn't see anything. I was able to fix most of
them in little more time than it took to remove the covers. I kept
several full sets of Delco transistors at my bench, but the two most
common failures were the RF and the mixer transistors. Rarely did it
take me more than five minutes to fix one.

When i was drafted I took the MOS test for Broadcast Engineer and got
the highest score on record. I tested out of the three year school, and
went straight to permanent duty.

BTW, most color TVs still had round CRTS like the 25JP22 when I
started, and the 23EGP22 was just hitting the market. It was one of the
worst color CRTs ever made. I moved into broadcast engineering, and
later into electronics manufacturing without any formal education in
electronics but I so many of the mistakes in the pre production samples
that became part of my job. They knew up front that I would tell them
where they screwed up, and what I felt they should do to fix the
problems. They rarely argued with my remarks. They also asked why I
didn't have an EE degree, since I was able to analyze and fix just about
anything and often with no schematics.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid™ on it, because it's
Teflon coated.