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Old 8th Feb 2015, 4:05 pm   #221
Neanderthal
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Hi David. Your school story sounds very like mine. Went to a Grammar school and the bias was similar to yours, classics, rugger and the old school tie. Like you I was more towards radio, but then National Service intervened and gave me a lucky break as a ground wireless mechanic in the RAF.
6 years for a TV course? Surely after that you'd have been designing them rather than repairing. I was demobbed in '55, got off the train in a strange town and landed a job in the first TV shop I set eyes on. Had to leave my belongings in the shop in order to search for lodgings. Finished up with the RTEB radio Cert, and of course the Amateur callsign. Beyond that I'm self taught.
Sounds as though you did OK for yourself, there are always other pathways we could have taken, but then it's not possible to do everything.
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Old 8th Feb 2015, 4:41 pm   #222
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All the best people seem to be self-taught.

Even by going to a place with a course on something doesn't change this. Things are generally badly taught, so whatever you come out of it with in your head, YOU put it there. My maths teacher at school was hopeless, so I had to teach myself when I needed it. On the degree course, the maths component was farmed out to the maths department (demarcation to rival the bolshiest union!) and the maths department were really only bothered about maths students. They couldn't care less about a bunch of engineers, and the engineers couldn't see what it was for. Noobody told them. Once I found it had uses, I hit the library and got going. The folk at HP taught me an awful lot.

I think that the people who have learned things have usually done it despite the educational system..

I grew up in the town Wendy hails from, and as I remember only one Chinese restaurant in the town centre, and as I remember reports in the 'Examiner' about things being found in fridges that should never be found in fridges..... I'd no idea what sort of radio or TV might have been in the place. No-one I knew ever went in.

I did the RAE as a school kid but never got anywhere I could do the Morse tes, so it remained in abeyance. In the 1980s I got interested again, couldn't find the paperwork so I did it again and hung off taking out a licence until I'd brushed up my Morse.

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Old 8th Feb 2015, 5:21 pm   #223
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I think there was more scope for being self taught in the fifties. It was a time for improvisation in a lot of fields, but today things tend to be more formal. For me it all started off when I was about 8, finding and old battery and a bulb and experimenting with both until the bulb would light. From there it was electric magnets, motors, amongst other things. A lot of time was spent with reacting detector radios, and then finally came a superhet. Then at 17 I buit a TV with a free tube which had a grid cathode short. This could be cleared by running the tube on heater only for around 10 minutes, after that it would perform normally. So our first TV had a standby switch. It was a TRF on 45MHZ and care was needed to avaid instability as there were many RF stages. National service was to follow, but the groundwork was laid for becoming a TV engineer.
I would say that the average wage in the industry around that time did not warrant a 6 year course.
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Old 8th Feb 2015, 11:38 pm   #224
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You are right, Mike.

When the "old school" are no more nothing will get built, designed, like in many trades, when the "olduns" are gone, the skills will be lost.

When I was at school, the "Science" teacher had no idea about electricity and such, so as David said, I self taught, but I was fortunate to have a good group of likeminded folk in the radio society, where I cut my teeth.
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Old 9th Feb 2015, 8:54 am   #225
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I had to teach myself into repairing TVs and VCR so I worked in a professional leasing company that leased PCs, monitors, video projectors; the big CRT sort weighed a ton - back breakers - they had to mount them on the ceiling. HSE would have a fit nowadays.

I used the professional stuff on TVs, the only difference was TVs have tuners when monitors just had video in and out.

I remember repairing a Sony professional monitor 25" I think had a broken case all over; it belonged to British Rail in Reading station.
As they moved it they dropped this poor Sony from a great height, the tube and chassis survived. So it was me to gut it and rebuild it in a new case from Sony - took me all day - and it worked. First time my boss told me off; you're supposed to spend a week on it!
I said well it's done now.

Last edited by Mike Phelan; 9th Feb 2015 at 10:16 am. Reason: Readability.
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Old 9th Feb 2015, 10:39 am   #226
Alan Stepney
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Doing odd stints for various radio/TV companies as I did, meant that I get to see a wide variety of places, met some interesting people, but also, inevitably, got all the nasty / troublesome jobs dumped on me.

One eccentric and wealthy customer would only wear hand-made shirts. And would only wear each one once.
Afterwards they would be sent to the laundry, and then given away.
I was the lucky recipient of some, and didn't buy shirts for several years. Indeed, it is only recently that I had to throw away the last of them.

Way back in the early days, a TV rental company had one particular customer where two people were always sent out.
One to carry in a replacment set, the other to walk in, pick up the old set and carry it out. All the while not breathing whilst in the house. (The old sets were dumped.)
I got the task once, and later learned that the man had attacked his wife with an axe, so she went to hospital and he to a mental hospital. The house was so bad that it had to virtually be rebuilt to make it habitable again.

Then, when I was with Philips, there was the High Court judge who wanted to sue everyone. I was given the task of "just go and sort it out".
The problem was that an engineer had called and taken the set away. Unfortunately he had unplugged the set but left the socket switched on. The Judge claimed that this was a deliberate attempt to harm him as the electricity would leak into the room. (Yes, honestly. !)

A brief talk with his clerk soon sorted that one.

Some fun times and I often felt that it could be interesting as a full time job, but that was not to be.
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Old 9th Feb 2015, 12:46 pm   #227
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Stepney View Post
there was the High Court judge who wanted to sue everyone. I was given the task of "just go and sort it out".
The problem was that an engineer had called and taken the set away. Unfortunatly he had unplugged the set but left the socket switched on. The Judge claimed that this was a deliberate attempt to harm him as the electricity would leak into the room. (Yes, honestly. !)
I wonder if this is the same judge that asked "Who are The Beatles?"

("A popular four-piece beat combo m'lud")
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Old 9th Feb 2015, 2:50 pm   #228
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Just proof that the old saying "If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" applies to many fields.

Wasn't the electricity leaking out of sockets one of James Thurber's stories about an aunt?

David
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Old 9th Feb 2015, 5:57 pm   #229
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My dad had a thing about always unplugging the TV from the mains last thing at night.

Being electrical numpties, my parents experienced the other side of the TV trade, like being sold a dual standard TV but with only a VHF aerial system. Out of loyalty they always went to the same shop. We were in a good signal area but the picture was awful on UHF. The box went backwards and forwards but in the end they simply stuck to 405 lines.

I twigged what was going on years later when I was old enough to climb into the loft and saw the contraption which was basically a slot fed element with two reflectors for band 3 with a vertical for band 1 mounted atop which seemed to use the rest as a kind of ground plane. I think it was around this time I became unpopular with the shop proprietor...

When the dual standard became tired they wanted colour and so went to one of the rental chains. There were very few problems with those sets - Ferguson TXs as I remember - though I gather that visiting engineers did comment on the metalwork on the back of the garage which by this time sported sizable 144MHz and 423MHz beams and and HF vertical.

Dad had a TV for the bedroom as a retirement gift. By the time this developed problems I knew enough people in the trade to get it repaired. His last TV was a bought Samsung CRT set from a high street chain. He had it for years. It just worked.
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Old 9th Feb 2015, 11:27 pm   #230
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I only went to an ordinary secondary school, although I could tell people I went to 'Charterhouse' as this was how it was known, it was actually Charterhouse Road Secondary school, no longer there now.

I was useless at most subjects, primarily because I wasn't interested in them, the only subject I excelled in was science and especially electronics although it wasn't called that then. I was known by one of the teachers as 'Radio junk' and was assured that I would do know good in the world due to my lack of an 'all round education' my teacher was still riding his bike to school when I had my first car - that's how the trade was in those days, the only teenager you saw with his own car was probably a TV engineer.

My father got me a job in London at a subsidiary of a well known photographic firm, I worked there for a year, I had to wear a black suit and tie and pay my daily rail fare out of my £3.00 per week wages. After one or two problems, which weren't entirely my fault I left and walked straight into a job at our local TV/radio/bicycle shop just before ITV started where I worked until we got married about 8 years later. I then started up on my own and apart from a couple of part time jobs remained that way for the rest of my working life.

There was still a shortage of TV engineers long after we moved here in 1970 in fact it lasted almost as long as the trade did.

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Old 10th Feb 2015, 5:22 pm   #231
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Hi Peter. Yes, there was a shortage of TV engineers for many years. I became aware of this when considering options on completion of National Service. I made enquiries one day while still in uniform by calling in at a TV shop on my way through Stamford. The young lady asistant gave me an excited look and said quickly: "Don't go away!" Then she scuttled off to return with an expectant looking manager.
I had to aplogise, saying that it was just a casual enquiry and that I still had a year to serve.
It's good to know that more emphasis is now being placed on apprenticeships, as it seems engineering skills in many branches are short.
Mike G4BIY.
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Old 14th Feb 2015, 10:36 am   #232
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I was largely self-taught, experimenting with stuff from the local tip. I went to a grammar school that had a good, enthusiastic physics teacher and our little after-school Radio Club (every Monday) was the highlight of my week.
Then came a Radio, TV and Electronics course at the local tech which hammered the basics into my head and then a job at a TV shop. I never trained for colour, I just absorbed it because I was interested.
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Old 14th Feb 2015, 6:14 pm   #233
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It seems that many of us are self taught Andy. As you say the interest helps in getting to grips with things. I built a colour set using Pye units (how I got them has gone from memory) and that, plus a correpondence course taught me a great deal. Building a decoder for an NTSC set was another useful excercise. My problem was not being good at maths, and my mother steered me away from TV servicing because of this. Of course maths is essential for R & D work, but my mother could only see me in Uni so it was a question of doing some National Service, and sort out career paths whilst away from home.
You mentioned the local tip, that was a good idea, but try to get stuff that way now, impossible in my area, even if you're willing to pay for it. Whether self taught or not, TV servicemen had to be resourceful, and acquire an number of secondary skills, diplomacy being one. If self employed, sorting out accounts was a challenge in its self.
Mike G4BIY
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Old 16th Apr 2016, 8:36 pm   #234
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Seems a while since anyone posted anything on this thread, so here is my 'two-pen'orth'.
After leaving the Navy in December 1973, I got a job as a TV Engineer for Rediffusion in Mansfield. At that time, Colour was just making an appearance, and most of the sets I worked on as a Field Engineer were Monochrome, both cable and aerial. When I started we were working a rather strange shift system, due to the fact that we were having to share a service van between two of us, eg, one day you would start at 4pm, waiting in the yard for your opposite number to come in, unload his equipment, load up your equipment, and work until 9pm, and then work the following day. It was a very confusing system, and eventually the Company provided us with our own service van, which led to a more normal working system.
Although I only spent a couple of years with Rediffusion, it was a very interesting and eventful time, and the saying, that ' You could write a book' is very apt! One event that I recall was a customer ringing in to ask for someone to collect his rental set, as it had been damaged. An apprentice was sent out, and came back creased up with laughter, dragging a tea chest with the remains of the television inside it. It was completely destroyed, the customer, in his anger and frustration, had taken a sledge hammer to it, and when asked what had happened, he replied that he was carrying it upstairs, and that he had stumbled and it had fallen out of his hands! Needless to say, no-one believed him, and he was billed for a new set.
I didn't stay long in this business, as I was starting a family and the pay was rather poor, so I went to work at the pit where the pay and working hours were better.
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Old 16th Apr 2016, 9:29 pm   #235
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For what's it's worth I will add my tuppence four farthings, I started in the radio/television trade in 1969, walked straight out of school into my first job for a one man outfit, he taught me most of what I know including a strong work ethic, the rest is entirely self taught including various college courses etc.
The thing I recall most from the early days as a young eager tech was that most of the old guys were complete eccentrics and nutters like the old engineer who wore the same demob suit for as long as I knew him and who's fingers were brown from nicotine stains.
Also looking back how the technology has changed from the valve based stuff of old through transistors to the first digital stuff made with discrete chips to todays tv's that are more computer than tv, and all of us have had to learn and adapt to that change.
It's never been the most well rewarded trade but interesting and varied wouldn't describe it, perhaps I shoukd write a book.
Greg.
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Old 17th Apr 2016, 12:35 am   #236
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I can't claim the depth of knowledge of some here. I'm C&G qualified, from when colour was an extra couple of years study at night school, but along the way I dipped in and out when other avenues presented. Amongst my earliest recollections are changing a wet electrolytic in a radio, elements in irons, re-tubing the old square BBC only TVs, aerial rigging, and the Radiospares Rep. Fast forward to single standard colour. I've done field and bench work, and worked in a TV factory, but little exposure to video, and none to flat screen of course. Eventually I was too out of touch to earn a living in TV, so it was Avionics, then Telecoms via a short stint in the Middle East, until redundancy beckoned. I'm afraid I don't have the photographic memory stretching from childhood, but I have picked up a fair bit on the way, and can stumble through many of today's little problems on an amateur basis.
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Old 17th Apr 2016, 12:19 pm   #237
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Ah yes, the Radiospares rep. He used to call every month for some years when I first had an account, later it was cut to once in three months, then six and then stopped coming altogether, in the '80s I think it was they closed my account because I didn't spend enough money with them.

Peter
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