[sdiy] How to best learn the trade

[Bob Weigel]

I started playing around with stuff as a little kid.  Read the ARRL book 
from 1971 that my dad got me at the age of 11 or 12 I guess and started 
to try to understand how a lot of things worked from there, building a 
few things that didn't work and finally a power supply that did out of 
that book.  Scrapped out a bunch of old TV's and learned to ID 
components and got a few books from ye-olde shack of radios... which I 
still treasure...well one of them anyway. I'm very familiar with were to 
find resistance tables and so on in it. 

Anyway I was real into Physics in HS and started as a Physics major but 
went to Science Education deciding I really didn't want to work in the 
research stuff as a career.  I'd delved into all kinds of stuff through 
the years.  I did a lot of photography and built my own enlagers, view 
camera etc. in college too after building telescopes when I was younger 
and then did a car project (350 vega :-) ) which was a lot of fun and 
involved electronic ignition design and various other things there.  
Then got a job at University of Oregon Inst. of Molecular biology where 
I troubleshot a lot of electronic gear and fabricated a lot of stuff in 
the machine shop and electronically.  Meanwhile got into setting up my 
first studio and pursuing that whole angle and quit after 8 years in the 
University and began developing musical products that went nowhere due 
to lack of development funds really.  People have no vision. They want 
to see something that's already tooled up basically which I had no money 
to do.

So I wound up servicing gear for some shops and continuing in my own 
musical ventures.   The passion for the art has always driven the desire 
to be proficient at the technical stuff.  But the love of science and 
just learning the fundamentals by taking the math and physics...there's 
just nothing to replace that I don't think in terms of being able to 
efficiently troubleshoot certain kinds of problems.   -Bob