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Hi-tech, it's never been easier

When I was about eight, my parents bought me a Philips EE8 Electronic Engineering kitset.

Inside the large flat cardboard box was an Aladdin's cave of goodies for a tech-obsessed young lad.

A pegboard base, eight paper overlays, a bunch of spring terminals, resistors, capacitors, two germanium transistors, a light bulb, potentiometer, tuning capacitor, earpiece and other components -- all just begging to be assembled into a radio, a metronome, a light flasher or whatever.

What a joy that set was and over the coming months I spent countless hours building, rebuilding and modifying the projects. This gift really helped kick-start my involvement in the hi-tech world.

However, life was not easy for a budding electronics engineer back then.

I recall the day my mother dropped a screwdriver onto the pegboard and shorted out a critical piece of circuitry -- blowing my precious AF116 transistor to hell and back.

Oh no!

Unfortunately, in a small town, hi-tech components such as a high-frequency PNP transistor were nowhere to be found.

Remember that this was the era of valve radios and black and white TV sets -- any transistor was hard to come by.

It took a long time to hunt down a source of AF116 transistors, save the money, buy a postal note and order it. All that time, my home-made radio was out of commission and I was forced to use my old crystal set instead.

It's worth noting that back in those days, I didn't have any of the instruments or tools that would have made life so much easier when designing and building my circuits. No multimeter, only an old 100W soldering iron and just tired dry-cell batteries for power. Meters, good soldering irons and other cool test-gear was very, very expensive back then. Even when I started work as a trainee technician, the Avo 8 meter in the workshop was shared by several people because it was just so expensive and you almost had to beg before you could have access to the oscilloscope or signal generator.

My, how things have changed.

While collecting together the bits for my SAA system (especially the more esoteric elements) I marveled at just how easy it is to locate and order the most obscure of components. Jump online, whip out the plastic and then, a week or two later, a package turns up at your door.

And wow... how prices have fallen.

That old AF116 transistor cost a very pretty penny (a couple of quid in early 1960's money) but these days you can pick up a hundred far more capable devices for a couple of dollars.

Then there's the test gear I could never have afforded.

For about $400 you can pick up a perfectly good dual-trace digital storage oscilloscope with inbuilt spectrum analysis (FFT) and all sorts of other wonderful features. The $5,000 200MHz frequency counter (with nixie tubes) I remember using while training has been surpassed by a $100 unit that's good to 2.4GHz.

That uber-expensive Avo 8 is outperformed in every way by the $100 DMM which will also measure capacitance, temperature and frequency.

And, if it's information you're after -- it abounds online.

No matter what the area of electronics tech you need help with, a quick search online will turn up masses of theory, tuition and examples.

Unbelievable!

It's just a shame that we don't seem to have the numbers of young folk who have a fire and a passion to get their hands dirty with this stuff.

As I've said in the past -- gone are the electronics hobby shops that, by the late 1970s, almost every town had. Gone are the plethora of electronics hobby magazines that fed and expanded eager minds. And gone (probably forever) is that wonderful EE8 kitset which kick-started the whole thing for me.

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