What happened to the Electronic Magazines?

[james_s]

Wow, one issue? I would have expected it to go longer than that just from momentum. Perhaps it was a last ditch effort that was immediately obvious was a failure.

[james_s]

Articles on pyramid power and the possibility that the Egyptian pyramids were actually giant transmitters.  I wrote the editors on this - they apologized and commented that they were short on material.

I must have missed that somehow, maybe I just tuned it out as I do with all the other content that doesn't interest me. I do recall an article in one of those magazines about an energy saving driver for low voltage incandescent lamps, clearly written by someone who didn't understand the limitations of an averaging DMM.

[floobydust]

Does this smell the same as Dick Smith, Maplin, Radio Shack?

Customer's needs and the market changes. Inept management makes moves in the wrong direction and the dinosaur dies, instead of evolving as needed.
EE's aren't the greatest at managing things like this, they (we) are technical types and don't have awareness of the popular social aspect, the business component.

I think electronics magazines can succeed, they just need to make adjustments and keep on track with the market.

What if we put together something about what to ditch and what to keep or expand for content?
Otherwise, it's all guesswork for a magazine's management, editors and crew. Pretty tough.

[james_s]

I think the problem is deeper and the magazine as a medium is in danger of going extinct. I don't know anyone under about 30 who still subscribes to magazines and a purely digital model may as well be a website to most people. The world is never going to return to the 1970s and earlier when it made sense for a lot of people to build cool gadgets out of discrete parts. Electronic gadgets in general are far cheaper than they were back then and overall they are far more complex too. People still build stuff, but only the ones who want to tinker. Back in the day a lot of people got into electronics out of necessity, if they couldn't build a gadget they wanted themselves they couldn't afford it.

[Sal Ammoniac]

I think Circuit Cellar is still around also.

Circuit Cellar is still around. It was bought by Elektor about ten years ago, but a year or two ago Steve Ciarcia, the founder of the magazine, bought it back from Elektor. They've recently changed editors and the new editor seems much better than the previous one.

[Specmaster]

I think the problem is deeper and the magazine as a medium is in danger of going extinct. I don't know anyone under about 30 who still subscribes to magazines and a purely digital model may as well be a website to most people. The world is never going to return to the 1970s and earlier when it made sense for a lot of people to build cool gadgets out of discrete parts. Electronic gadgets in general are far cheaper than they were back then and overall they are far more complex too. People still build stuff, but only the ones who want to tinker. Back in the day a lot of people got into electronics out of necessity, if they couldn't build a gadget they wanted themselves they couldn't afford it.

It isn't just about building gadgets, its about learning electronics and learning how to take something, tinker with it and tweak it to do something else as well. Over here in the UK I can get a few magazines all about building things with Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos, but there re for the most part pre-built modules with a handful of discrete parts used to couple them together and some code to be written.

Where are all the engineers coming from in the future to design the next generation of controllers for instance if all they know is how to connect modules together? Someone has to think about the modules and design them in the first instance and if we are not careful that skill will be gone.

[Tac Eht Xilef]

Hi, speaking about Magazines, I would like to ask for some help from the people in Australia.
Do you know if the AWA Tech. Rev. is available somewhere on-line ?
I am trying to find an article from the A.W.A. Technical Review Vol. 6 Issue 4, March 1944,  page 193
Rudd, J.B. "Theory and Design of radio-frequency transformers" 

To answer the question that resurrected this thread: no, I don't think any of the AWA Tech Review series are available on-line; at least, I've never found any. The NLA has a full set, and a few university libraries have either full or partial sets - but, unfortunately, not any that I currently have access to.

You can try requesting a PDF copy of the article from the NLA's CopyDirect service - although they say they might not be able to do it as copyright status is "uncertain", I've had no troubles with them doing copies of individual articles under similar circumstances. Cost, last I looked, was AU$16.50 for up to 50 pages or part thereof.

[james_s]

It isn't just about building gadgets, its about learning electronics and learning how to take something, tinker with it and tweak it to do something else as well. Over here in the UK I can get a few magazines all about building things with Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos, but there re for the most part pre-built modules with a handful of discrete parts used to couple them together and some code to be written.

Where are all the engineers coming from in the future to design the next generation of controllers for instance if all they know is how to connect modules together? Someone has to think about the modules and design them in the first instance and if we are not careful that skill will be gone.

All that information is available online now and there's more of it than ever. People may start out connecting modules together but some of them eventually dig in deeper and move on to more advanced things. There are kids designing PCBs and building stuff with surface mount parts, things very few established hobbyists were doing 20-30 years ago. I can only imagine how much more I'd have been able to learn if I'd had access to the modern internet and all the sources of parts we have today instead of just the magazines I had when I was a kid.

[vk6zgo]

It isn't just about building gadgets, its about learning electronics and learning how to take something, tinker with it and tweak it to do something else as well. Over here in the UK I can get a few magazines all about building things with Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos, but there re for the most part pre-built modules with a handful of discrete parts used to couple them together and some code to be written.

Where are all the engineers coming from in the future to design the next generation of controllers for instance if all they know is how to connect modules together? Someone has to think about the modules and design them in the first instance and if we are not careful that skill will be gone.

All that information is available online now and there's more of it than ever. People may start out connecting modules together but some of them eventually dig in deeper and move on to more advanced things. There are kids designing PCBs and building stuff with surface mount parts, things very few established hobbyists were doing 20-30 years ago. I can only imagine how much more I'd have been able to learn if I'd had access to the modern internet and all the sources of parts we have today instead of just the magazines I had when I was a kid.

There is a definite caveat in this.
In quite a few occasions, the circuits presented on the Internet are unworkable.
I covered this in Reply 29.

[ferdieCX]

I've worked as a school teacher. The issue with electronics at schools (particularly in Australia) is students are passive consumers rather than active "makers". This occurs in electronics, computing and software.

The only electronics I've taught has been with the Raspberry Pi and robotics.

One very accomplished student, who is now studying electronic engineering, had no real electronics knowledge, did not have a soldering iron. But he is a whiz at advanced maths, which he needed to get him into a top university.

I have been interested in electronics since age six. You don't see this interest in schools.

I teach electronics in the introductory  "Year 0" at the local technical university (UTU). It is for students who have done only the normal High School instead of the technical one. About 80 % of each generation want to study power electricity. This is because they feel that, with the dirty cheap and disposable electronic devices of today, they will not find a job in electronics.
When I show them old issues of the now defunct magazine "Corriente Alterna", they are amazed about all things that once where built here.
By the way, I started with electronics at age ten (Although I called it then Radiotechnics)

[Kjelt]

The same trend here, power electronics, energy and utility will always be part of each community, jobs guaranteed.
Low voltage, digital electronics jobs are gone or leaving towards the east 
You can't blame a student to choose for a career that will feed his family but sad it is.

[schmitt trigger]

In quite a few occasions, the circuits presented on the Internet are unworkable.
I covered this in Reply 29.

Not only unworkable, but many times dangerous.

Anyone can Google "capacitive power supply", and find circuits which claim that will get 5 volts @ 1 amp from a 230 volt AC supply, to cheaply power your next Arduino project.

[james_s]

I don't know about you guys, but I managed to cobble together plenty of unworkable and/or dangerous projects on my own without any help from the internet. Yes there is a lot of noise on the net but there is a lot of good stuff too. I'm nostalgic about the old magazines but archives still exist. The world has changed and that model is just not likely to be sustainable going forward. There's a saying along the lines of "the worst enemy of the best is good enough" and for most people now the internet is good enough.