The thing that appeals to me most about this forum is how different people think about circuity. Every day I read through the posts and have come to feel that several people here could be my best friends.

I grew up on an isolated farm where there wasn't a lot of technology. When I was about sixteen my father allowed me to stay after school to help an 'old' man that owned a Radio Shop. Sometimes I walked three miles home, but not often. The man I worked for must have been 65, ancient. This would have been 1945. He never tried to teach me much but I got so I could fix a lot of radios by swapping tubes, or if the announcer sounded as if he had a frog in his throat change the filters, or speaker. In my mind I never tried to picture a flow of electrons or anything esoteric. I rather thought there was a gremlin hidden in all the capacitors coils and resistors. After I got pretty good the shop owner died and his wife sold all the shop things to someone far away. I had a car by then and asked a man in a little town about 10 miles away if he needed some help. He hired me to work in his shop part time for 50 cents an hour. But he was a different type of guy. He taught me right away to use a Jackason tube tester and Tripplet multimeter. His shop was neat and I swept it out every evening. When there was some slack time he would go through some old issues of Radio News and explain how the circuits functioned. How a superhet differed from a TRF set. How the grid of a tube controlled electron flow ect. I learned how to measure element voltages on a suspect tube. How to check DC leakage across some capacitors. It was a bright new world and he introduced me to Ohm's law and Kirkchoff's law. I was pretty good taking those car radio's out and putting them back. I had a good time but I moved on to make a little more money. I had learned that a radio worked by capturing a tiny bit of RF energy and boosting it enough to power a set of headphones, or a speaker. There wasn't a gremlin in that mass of wire and tubes in those shiny cabinets after all.

I love to read all your thoughts. Thanks to you all and to electronics for making my life enjoyable.
Ivan Copas

My personal philosophy is that I want to understand how things work before I repair them. There is a certain satisfaction obtaining this knowledge and it sure makes troubleshooting/repair a lot easier versus the shotgun or replace-one-component-at-a-time approach. I never had a mentor...I picked up much of what I know by reading available literature (i.e. Marcus & Levy, etc). I've also learned a lot from material available on the internet including some of the great antique radio forums such as this one and ARF.