In today's "Instant gratification" world, its a sad fact of life.
Too many cool electronic toys are on the shelves, and are too easy to
toss when they get tired of them. Its hard to find someone who wants to
learn it because they wanted to. The kids either saw bug money, or were
forced into by their family. One kid told me he didn't need to know how
to solder, because he was going to build robots, and was telling his
teacher that no one used an oscilloscope anymore. The teacher saw me
walking into the class and said, "He does!" and asked what I had on the
bench. At that time I had a Tektronics 350 Mhz 4 channel scope, and
described about 20 other pieces of equipment on the bench to him and the
other kids.
Most was used daily, and if I didn't use something at least one day a
week I told our in house Cal lab to give it to another tech. You should
have seen the look on the other techs faces when I was offered the first
of the new HP RF network analyzers for my bench and passed on it. Jaws
dropped as I asked another tech if he wanted it, on the condition that I
could "Borrow" it if I ever needed it. I was doing more analog and
digital at the time and he needed to align tubular filters so he would
use it several days a week and it tripled his output.
Several of the EEs at Microdyne wanted to know why I was working as a
tech instead of going back to school to get my degree. I told them it
was because of my health. Four years later, I'm 100% disabled.
When
I found a problem, I dug up the data sheets, did my research and not
only told them, "We have a problem", I gave them the answer. I also
designed and built some of the test fixtures, I wrote and updated test
procedures. When engineering wrote them they were too close to the
design. Some steps were out of logical order. Descriptions were poor
because they wouldn't describe how to set up the test equipment for some
critical tests. You were supposed to "Know" what they were thinking.
When I wrote, or updated an older test procedure I would toss the proof
copy on a bench and ask one or two techs to try it that didn't normally
do that board or module to make sure I didn't miss anything. I took the
test and alignment time on some boards from 2.5 hours down to 18
minutes. I wrote software to recalculate the set of resistors for sets
of low pass Sallen Key video filters to tweak the -3 db point. Some of
the original calculations had too much ripple and there were 14, 1%
parts in the two stage filter with a 10% output spec. What I'm trying
to say is, Don't be afraid to learn new things in any area of
electronics, because you'll use it to build other skills on.
--
Former professional electron wrangler.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
