Re: [IRCA] Radio shack to file for bankruptcy

[Nick Hall-Patch <nhp@xxxxxxxx>]

An OT philosophical discussion.....I'd be curious about the figures 
for electronic DIYers, Russ.  Does one exclude those who fiddle with 
microcontrollers (see magazines like Circuit Cellar or Elektor), 
monkey with Linux, hack the Pentagon?   It's not particularly DX or 
even hardware oriented, of course, but DIY I think it is.  It may be 
a smaller percentage of the population than 50 years ago, but I 
wonder.   I've run into younger people who work as game developers, 
and I don't think they started by taking professional training as 
game developers, they DIYed....it's just that they didn't need a 
drill and a soldering iron to do it.

Of course, our work world relies far less on hand oriented tech 
skills than it once did also.   Yet, there are these "maker spaces" 
that allow the DIYer access to tools that a small home workshop might 
not have, something I might have appreciated in own younger 
days.  (who knows what goes on in China?  The fact that Tecsun put 
out a kit that is essentially one of their DSP ultralights on a board 
makes me wonder, as the market in America can't have been great)

Even in the good ol' days, far more DIYers modified their cars than 
played with radios from what I can recall, so we've always been a 
minority.    But the day I heard somebody's phone cheep out "SMS" in 
Morse code was the day I realized that maybe at least the ham techies 
had taken over the world in a small way, hi.  (how often do we see 
the schematic symbol for an antenna in a public environment, speaking 
of phones?   That was pretty arcane stuff, something you'd see on the 
cover of the ARRL Handbook, when I was first making smoke with 
electronic components.)

Having spouted all that, I suspect there are fewer hot iron 
types....but the spirit that drove those types now drives different 
forms of technical creativity.

best wishes,

Nick




At 19:16 15-01-15, you wrote:
> I doubt that their old paradigm is workable today. Just as the number of
> radio hobbyists - hams, DX'ers, SWL's - is shrinking,
> so is the pool of electronics DIY'ers. A lot of the DIY market implosion
> results from advanced circuitry moving beyond more and
> more people who lack the type of technical knowledge to continue.





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