[Hallicrafters] Nobody wants to be a "technician" anymore

[Anthony W. DePrato]

At 09:35 PM 3/30/2008, TC Dailey wrote:
>I'm in the commercial fire-alarm business, and as such, have found, along
>with my competitors, that finding technicians (ANY technicians) who have a
>grasp of simple electronics and the usage of a multimeter, to be nearly
>impossible these days.  I personally witnessed one so-called
>"technical-representative" (from a Major company) come up to an earlier
>"hard-wired" (non addressable) fire panel, and get totally frustrated,
>because he could'nt find the "plug in for the laptop".
>
>We've raised an entire generation of folks who think that the world is run
>with a keyboard, and haven't a clue of how to use DEDUCTIVE REASONING for
>problem solving.  The electronics stores are just the outward "sore" - the
>true disease lies beneath the skin, I'm afraid.
>
>Tom - WØEAJ
>Tom:

you are 100% correct we are a dying breed i still 
replace compontants in radios and computers to 
fix them hi hi.. most just get file 13ed this day 
and time. here is one for you . a major cell 
phone and pager company has a transmitter site in 
one of my radio buildings. i was working on one 
of my radios when i noticed one of their 
transmitters was down. only putting out a few 
watts. called them and they sent their field tech 
over to fix it. well he plugged in his computer 
to the port and said yep powers down must me bad 
tubes. so he put in two new ones. then he did the 
weirdest thing hi.. he pulled out a plastic card 
from his shirt pocket and set the load and tune 
controls to the numbers on the card. hit the tx 
switch and the power came up to about 200 watts. 
well that took care of that he said. i walked 
over looked at the tube boxes and said these are 
rated at 450 watts out for a pair. he said well 
we can only get 200 out of them because of the 
antenna mismatches and the freq we are on. jezzzzzzzzzzz
asked him if i could try it he said sure. i 
switched the meter to plate current grabbed the 
tune and dipped the plate added some loading 
dipped it again switched the meter to power out 
and he about passed out how did you get 400 watts 
out of this transmitter. so i spent the next 20 
mins showing and explaining to him how to tune a 
transmitter hi... i think we are going in reverse on a fast track these days
73 Tony

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QBE  ZUT  DE WA4JQS

ANTHONY W. (Tony) DePrato WA4JQS EXTRA - HEAVY
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