Electronics has become just a synonym for mobile phones, MP3 players and diverse short lived video and gaming devices.
The way I see it, hands on electronics is a dying trade even in the amateur sector.
Look at a Dick Smith store today
My 10y/o is the only kid in his school who shows some interest in actual electronics(guess why ).
But it is all computers these days... and some 10y/o s can be real whizz kids there.
Electronics is designed on a computer, printed out on a bit of silicon, mass produced with a robot, then fitted in an enclosure, tested and packed by some chicks somewhere in Asia.
It is therefore ultra cheap and not worth the effort of building yourself.
When I was about 13y/o, I built a 2x6(real mean Watts) amplifier and some rather large enclosures for speaker chassis from a surplus store and successfully powered the school disco with my compact cassette recorder connected to it.
It made the school standard Dual turntable with inbuilt 2x6W speaker system sound like a teletubby telephone, for a quarter of the cost.
Today you can get a 200(phoney Watt) 5.1 sound system for $200 that even sounds reasonable. So what is the point of DIY?
Same with music electronics. I built guitar amps, even synthesisers, multivoice organs... totally nuts. Today you just download a software version of a Hammond B3 on your computer and it sounds better than Deep Purple and weighs 100kg less.
40ch UHF transceivers(walkie talkies) with several kms range for $39.95... do I have to blubber on?
I am a die hard and you will have to pry my Weller out of my cold dead fingers but today's generation have somehow moved on and see no point in visualising a single transistor.
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