View Single Post
  #11  
Old 07-10-2016, 08:22 PM
N2IXK's Avatar
N2IXK N2IXK is offline
Technohippie
 
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Sittin' on the "Group W" bench...
Posts: 799
I owe my career in electronics to an early interest in the workings of television, and building all kinds of projects and circuits from a combination of trashpicked TV sets and parts from the pegboards at the local Radio Shack. I soon moved on to reading some books on TV repair and learned to fix up some of the nicer discarded sets and sell them for extra spending money. The ability to do this got me my first couple part-time jobs in TV repair shops, while most of my friends were pumping gas or flipping burgers for considerably less money.

By the time I got out of HS, the age of BPC sets was well underway, and it was apparent that TV repair wasn't going to remain a profitable endeavor much longer. I made a shift over to commercial/broadcast video repair (lots of work for VHS duplicating houses with endless racks of VCRs) for a year or so while studying EE during the day. Eventually was offered a job at a university research lab, in part because of my experience with video systems, but I eventually moved up to replace their retiring instrumentation guru building all manner of one-off custom instrumentation and systems for scientific research.

I still like playing around with analog TV and vintage sets as a hobby partly to keep the technology from being completely forgotten, and because it reminds me of my younger days and several great folks (now gone) who taught me about the workings of the technology over the years. I like to restore sets to working condition for people who want them, partly out of a sense of guilt for all the restorable now collectible sets I shredded into pieces in my early years of learning...
Reply With Quote