Feel THIS ;-)

Chuck wrote:

+yaluM wrote in message ...
;-)

Chuck wrote:

I do that pretty well...butt suck.

Chuck muck bophuc

Stop. You're hurting my feelings.
Chuck

"L." ) writes:
"Scott McKnight" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 02:46:36 GMT, "VT1" wrote:

RADIO SHACK :

YOU HAVE QUESTIONS? .... WE HAVE DUMB LOOKS!

You have questions? ...we have some products that we'll attempt to
shoehorn into your solution. BTW, can we sell you a cellular phone
today?

-Scott



I usually kill the "new cell phone" pitch by walking in with mine in open
view. Works most of the time! As to shopping, you're better off knowing what
you want and need and what they offer before going in. At least most of us
are better equipped to do that, than the average person! Usually, the guys
at the store I go to, know my electronics background, so they rarely bother
me. It's the newbies who don't know, who approach me. It is sad that many
are clueless in what they sell. It isn't easy knowing everything. What hurt
them, is the motto.. "You have questions, we have answers." Too many take
that for granted. The employees I suppose try to help even if they come up
with half wit answers. They "should" endeavor to learn what they sell, but
they're also made to push the cell phones and such..... They can't be making
any commission worth a damned off off a $1.99 part. The other thing is too,
that with SMT technology, not many are repairing let alone
building/experimenting these days.

L.



Every time threads like this come up, someone brings in their slogan.

shopping at radio shack......................

like shopping for bread at the hardware store.

73 ku4yp.

"John Miller" wrote in message
...
Steve wrote:
In MHO, radio shack should have gone out of business years ago!
I use to know 3 people that worked in different stores.
All of them said basically the same thing. The equipment is nice
looking
but the insides are substandard and the parts
(if they have them) are only experimenters quality.

Leaves one wondering about just one thing, Steve. If the RS employees are
as stupid as you claim they are, HOW WOULD THEY KNOW?
--
John Miller
Email address: domain, n4vu.com; username, jsm

"Because he's a character who's looking for his own identity, [He-Man is]
an
interesting role for an actor."
-Dolph Lundgren, "actor"

(Mike Andrews) wrote in message ...
Scott Dorsey wrote:

Imagine if you will a group of design engineers sitting around trying to figure
out how to make equipment more annoying for broadcast folks. "I know, we can
put the power supply all at the bottom so you have to pull all the channel
strips out to get to it, making it impossible to test under load." "Great,
and then we can use output capacitors that fail into intermittent shorts
so that the supply has to be loaded to find them!"

I didn't know you'd ever worked at KCSC-FM.

Regulators with failure modes that involve smoking the full-wave
bridge.

Capacitors that explode.

Leaking tantalum capacitors that eat the traces off the boards.

Leaking batteries ditto.

UPS battery chargers adjusted so that the "float" voltage is about 10%
too high, so that the batteries outgas, leak, and die.

Ground-loop city.

A plate capacitor on the ttransmitter's final that turns out to be
a strip of PTFE wrapped around the final tube, above the HV lead,
and which gets punched through about once a month.

A grounding hook with a broken resistor in it. The idea is to
discharge the HV PS capacitors "gently". That's fine, as long as the
resistor maintains continuity and discharge to "safe" levels (0 VDC
for me, TYVM) doesn't take a week.

You had grounding hooks with resistors in them? Ours were simply 1/4"
diameter bent aluminum hooks connected to ground with #6 stranded
wire! (At least on the Gates BC-10B and RCA Ampliphase 50-Kw models).

I agree that the newer broadacast transmitters are horrow showd to
repair, but their selling point is that they are much more compact and
inexpensive. Still, putting a resistor in series with the safety
grounding hook? That's insane!

Cheap transmitters allow broadcast operators to buy transmitters for
the cost of one of the older rigs, but repairs of a failed transmitter
can linger into hours or days, unlike minites and seconds of dead air
time with a single transmitter as it was in the past.

Just as an afterthought, I remember one failure when the transmitter
of WBUD in Trenton kicked off while I was on duty. The transmitter
kicked off on a hot summer day, and on restart attempts I saw the
antenna feed current meter pin on each attempt. I was intercepted by
the station owner while I was in the process of scrambling to find a
large screwdrive and a flat file in our repair shop, who demanded to
know why I wasn't inside the transmitter trying to located the
problem. I ignored him and ran out into the antenna field, and on the
second tower of our 4-tower array found a large, carbonized insect in
the lighting gap between the tower and ground. Once found, the problem
took no more than 5-seconds to resolve and we were within 15-seconds
of that back on the air.

Given that a problem like this COULD have shut the station down for a
day or two, the station owner remained ****ed that I had ignored him
and simply done the job that he was paying me for. Fortunately shortly
after this even I received my degree and went to work for Eastman
Kodak in far away Rochester, NY.

I suppose that the only reason that I dredge up this ancient history
is that this was the expected technical performance of an FCC license
holder back in the 1950-1970 era. What is it today?

Harry C.

Harry Conover wrote:

I suppose that the only reason that I dredge up this ancient history
is that this was the expected technical performance of an FCC license
holder back in the 1950-1970 era. What is it today?

They don't have them any more.

They do have guys with SBE certifications who basically have the same
technical performance, except they spend their time removing viruses
from automation control systems....
--scott

I got a Volumax on the bench today too. Unfortunately the T-pad
on the input seems to be bad.
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 19:43:55 +0000, Michael Black wrote:

Every time threads like this come up, someone brings in their slogan.

Only because it's so absurd.

I love the absurd.

``You want a 40 micro-farad, 600
volt cell phone? Sure, we have that!''

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 03:11:17 +0000, Steve wrote:

... I once asked for a replacement rod type pull up antenna.

``You want a replacement rod type pull
up cell phone? We have those!''

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:20:04 +0000, John Miller wrote:


Leaves one wondering about just one thing, Steve. If the RS employees are
as stupid as you claim they are, HOW WOULD THEY KNOW?

``You want a stupid cell
phone? We have those!''

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 21:48:10 +0000, kash wrote:

Or you could go to my local RS and talk to the kids who don't
know a carburetor frlom a klystron.

Or you could go to the same store and talk to the retired HP
tech who knows more than any of you.

Your choice.

Not really. Your store is within
reasonable distance of *what* percentage
of usenet readers?

Yeah, I thought so.

There are three RS within reasonable
driving distance of my house. One is
at the mall. I hate malls. So that's
out.

Of the other two, one has two employees
who really try to help, the other has
one. None of them really know much about
electronics. But they're good people,
and they try, and I can always figure out
if they have what I need (IOW, I ran out
of something and I need it now).

One of these stores used to have a
guy who knew something. Presumably the
guys in black body suits from RSHQ hauled
him off in the middle of the night and
shot him. Tell your HP friend to watch
his six.

``You want a 12AX7? It's a what?
A vacuum tube? Is that a type of
cell phone? We have those!''

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 02:57:05 +0000, Mike Andrews wrote:

I liked going to some of the Radio Shacks in San Antonio, TX, back when I
was in the Air Farce. Most of the [classified school] instructors seemed
to have part-time jobs at them, and that was a group with really serious
clue.

Well, yeah, in 1967 they were an electronics
store in a thriving DIY culture. I loved RS
back then, even though Lafayette was better.
(RS was far more convenient.)

``You want a cell phone shaped like
Marilyn Monroe or Mighty Mouse? We
have those!''