EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: SgtRock on November 30, 2014, 03:59:21 am
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Greeting EEVBees:
--I think we all know that RS is on life support, but it has been that way for some time now. Here is an interesting article from a former Radio Shack employee, about working long hours and putting up with corporate crap, while making little money, and watching paint dry. I have a friend who is now RS manager, working long hours for little money. He says he would quit if he could afford it. Likely he will be out of a job sometime next year anyway.
http://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy-stories (http://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy-stories)
"The actress delivered a striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B"
Dorothy Parker 1893 - 1967
Best Regards
Clear Ether
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My only memories of RS include spending insane amounts of money for ridiculously trivial devices. This includes spending $30 for a 6' serial cable, $20 for a 12v wallwart, etc. Good riddance, they should have gone out of business a decade ago.
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Young, dumb, and stupid...
Put a CoCo I (16K, standard basic) on layaway for something like 6 months. Finally picked it up. A week later they released the CoCo II. Put that on layaway for another handful of months. Picked it up. Thought I was the absolute tech-geek when I upgraded the 16K ram up to 64K by ordering individual chips from Digikey vs. buying the RS upgrade kit. Furthermore, sent off for a pirated version of Extended Basic from the back of some magazine. I've still got the last version of the CoCo II sitting in the garage. I should pull it out one day and see what that video looks like on a 55" LCD! Maybe not...might throw up a little in my mouth.
The best RS story I've got was when a friend and I went to the local RS with full intention of copying the Zaxxon game tape that was sitting there in the tape player on the demo machine. We got away with it, got it back home, and of course it didn't work. We tried again a few days later, and about halfway thru the copying, my friend had a grand mal seizure. He'd never had one before. I had no idea WTF was going on. The manager on duty freaked out, basically froze stiff behind the counter. Nobody else in the shop or in the area. Had to grab the phone from him and look up the number to the local hospital (pre-911 days). Took at least a good 1/2 hour for the ambulance to get there. By that time, he was up and around, tired, a bit confused, but otherwise all there. He's now one of those guys that later ended up having his brain almost entirely split down the middle. Don't know the specifics of it all, but he's one of those guys that can close one eye and can't tell you what he's looking at. Hasn't had any sort of seizure since.
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Reading that article about workers abuse, terrible. Almost the same as McDonalds today where they order employees to clock out on slow times but they are not allowed to go home even if they got no pay. When it gets busier they are allowed to clock in agaun, rediculous.
Back to RS they were called Tandy in our country and they had this incredible expensive computer hardware in the 80's almost nobody normal could buy here since the $ was 3,5 guilder back then ( today it would be less than half) and we had import tax and 19% sales tax, so a computer would be about 5 times more expensive here than in the US.
They went bankrupt here already in the early 90's and remember buying a lot if their (overprized) inventory. I can't umagine that they still exist in the US with ebays and ither competitors banging the hell out of them.
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They were late to the Maker wave, but it did help sustain them a bit. Honestly, if it weren't for Radio Shack I wouldn't be into electronics. In the Early-90's with no access to the Internet, they were my outlet to getting started. By 1997 I had net access and it changed everything.
By the early 2000's they had stopped selling DIY stuff and were mostly "The Cell Phone and Overpriced Battery Hut".
Sent from my Tablet
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I like radioshack, for their accessibility and quick turn around. Prices are not an issue for me.
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I worked for RS in the early 90's. I agree, pay was poor. I did get my hands on lots of old discontinued stuff when the manager was replaced. I had a Coco3 with 2 floppy drives and lots of software, 2 sets of Minimus 7 speakers that I still have and a 3 1/2 inch red display digital alarm clock that is still accurate and lets me set it in military time which drives SWMBO crazy.
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Back in the late 70s and through the 80s Radio Shack sold great stuff. They had some really good stereo equipment and lots of other nice consumer electronics. Their electronic parts were always over-priced, but they were there if you needed them and mail order was about the only other option.
Sadly, they did not adapt when the internet came along and turned into mainly a cell phone store. Competing in that market with Walmart was obviously doomed to failure, but for some reason they never came up with a better plan.
I spent thousands of dollars there back in the day, but I've only been inside a Radio Shack a couple of times in the last 10 years.
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If you needed one or two small items, Radio Shack was the place to go. No minimum purchase, no shipping costs and you walked out of the store with the item you needed.
They serve a purpose.
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I have fond memories of Radio Shack from when I was a kid. I was interested in electronics at a young age and with no access to the Internet at the time I would get parts and information any way I could. I bought many different components there and sometimes tried to figure them out with experimentation because I had no other way. When I bought a breadboard I shorted out my circuit because I had no idea that the rows of pins were connected. I thought I had to shove the same wire into the same hole to connect the two.
Just this past weekend I restored a Radio Shack Red Arrow Frame Buggy RC car that I had as a kid. Back in the 80s to early 90s they had a lot of great RC cars. The Red Arrow wasn't worth restoring but I had fun doing it anyway. The entire thing was cheaply made and the soldering and design of the electronics was terrible but it still runs. It used relays for speed control and they still work. One funny thing about it is the servo is just a pot and motor with no controller. The controller was integrated into the main electronics board. It seems like any way they could do it non-standard, they did.
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I logged many hours on one of these:
(https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1398/773052449_f4378e0250.jpg)
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I 'll see your 150-in-1 and I and raise you
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/radio-shack-recollections/?action=dlattach;attach=121375;image)
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/radio-shack-recollections/?action=dlattach;attach=121377;image)
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I logged many hours on one of these:
(https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1398/773052449_f4378e0250.jpg)
I had the exact same, the one and only Tandy in Dublin closed during the early-mud 80s.
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I 'll see your 150-in-1 and I and raise you
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/radio-shack-recollections/?action=dlattach;attach=121377;image)
I think I had that same 100-in-1 box, only it was "Mykit" brand. Had no idea what I was doing at the time, except that I could use the relay as a buzzer. :-)
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I'm utterly amazed RS (as Radio Shack) are still a thing. We used to have them over here in the UK but known as Tandy. They were rediculously overpriced and vastly understocked compared to Maplin. Also, the Maplin catalogue was a MUST BUY for all the data it contained.
RS in the UK is the famous RS Components and another category altogether. When I were a lad they were a trade only thing with minimum order quantities and stuff.
PRS was a very well known couple of shops that had all been knocked through to each other in Dale Street, Liverpool UK. They certainly beat Maplin/Tandy and RS on price and more obscure components suited to the TV and VCR repair industry. I loved it that I could go in and get a sweety bag like I remember from my childhood, filled with a couple of resistors, caps, a zener, and a couple of transistors that took the guy behind the counter at least 10 minutes to find and I could have some banter with the other dudes in the tiny shop space while waiting, only to be presented with my sweety bag and asked for something stupid like 34 pence cash. :)
I believe Tandy (Radio Shack) died back in the mid 1990's, while Maplin moved away from discrete components to products and over priced Chinese tat. My once beloved PRS also followed Maplin and kind of dropped it's component side, switching to car stereos, cables, etc. Though I haven't been there for years. Maybe with the "maker movement" good old component level electronics is back in vogue?
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They could also work on maybe replacing HeathKit or doing like the Auduino / maker scene
I doubt that would have saved them - the population is just too small. Today's young people have largely moved away from making things.
Radioshack bet its fortune on cell phones. Unfortunately, they deployed a flawed model - they just sell customer sign-ups, no revenue for Radioshack after that. They could have sold their own branded cell phone services where they buy capacity from carriers in bulk and get paid for volume pricing and subscriptions, like MetroPCS, H2O, etc.
Instead, they had to constantly buy phones (aka bear significant technology risks) in order to entice the next customer to sign up with them.
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About 4 years ago RS did start marketing to the Maker crowd. Only a few years AFTER they had stopped selling most DIY stuff. They sold official Arduino boards, plus kits from Make and shields from Seeed. Last year they started clearing the Seeed stuff out, only to replace it with RS branded stuff. They also cleared their line of Parallax stuff, with no replacement.
I got about $1500 worth of parts and shields last year for under $250.
When they close for good you can be sure I'll buy up every last component for penises on the dollar.
Sent from my Tablet
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We call it haggling too. Fucking Canadians with their free health care, spreading lies about us.
Seriously though, outside of car sales and private transactions nobody haggles anymore. It's a shame.
Sent from my Tablet
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Timb, penises on the dollar? You have more than 1? :-+ Your significant other must be VERY happy!
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We call it haggling too. Fucking Canadians with their free health care, spreading lies about us.
Seriously though, outside of car sales and private transactions nobody haggles anymore. It's a shame.
I agree. In some middle eastern cultures it is considered rude or idiotic not to engage in some good old fashioned haggling! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n3LL338aGA) :-DD
I remember after watching The Life of Brian with my school mates, going into Mr Patels shop and trying to haggle with him over the price of Rowntrees Fruit Pastilles. He looked at me like I was insane, and wouldn't back down by even 1p. But six months later he gave me the paper boy job. I miss the delicious meat samosas his wife would make fresh for sale. Sigh!
(Oh, and my paper boy wages would all be spent on my BBC Micro and Maplin gear too!)
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In the UK I originally obtained everything from the Army & Navy surplus stores. They had largely closed by the late 60's at least as regards to the electronic 'junk'.
Henry's were a good mail order supplier to the hobbyist - Tandy and Maplin came along later. There were also a plethora of smaller local shops catering to hobbyists and providing what amounted to a speak easy. The latter have largely disappeared and have, understandably, been sadly replaced by a relatively few internet shops.
Henry's has moved to ready built equipment, I haven't seen Tandy's for years and Maplin whilst still around are relatively expensive and has a much reduced discrete component stock and cater more for prebuilt kit.
Conversely the larger suppliers will now cater for the hobbyist which at one time they wouldn't.
I still miss dropping into the local hobby shops just for a chat. Somehow these forums, brilliant though they are don't quite fill the void.
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I still miss dropping into the local hobby shops just for a chat. Somehow these forums, brilliant though they are don't quite fill the void.
That's something like I said earlier with the re-modelling of our local indie PRS (Progressive Radio Spares, IIRC) trying to become more of a modern Maplin, and having low paid staff that don't have a clue about electronics.
If you are into DIY with your cars then the independent motor factors often have that kind of slow, but skilled, service. Plenty of time to have a chinwag with customers or staff in the shop. Hell, I even briefly thought it would be a good way to meet girls when a rather buxom and friendly lass popped in to get some brake pads. I mean a girl who knows how to change brake pads? What's not to love! :-// ;)
ETA: Just did some googling and indeed my PRS looks like it has closed down thanks to the City Council & Property Developer sharks. Streetview here (https://goo.gl/maps/YtPZ2) :(
ETA: Had to nip up the road towards the Mersey to see that Thomas Rigby's still exists, for a virtual pint (https://goo.gl/maps/ICclv). Horatio Nelson would take refreshment there when his ships were docked at Liverpool. Always a great pub when on an evening out in the Commercial District. :-+
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Timb, penises on the dollar? You have more than 1? :-+ Your significant other must be VERY happy!
Oh, she was, let me tell you. They're all different, too, varying in size, color, texture and sleevedness. I've got a black one, a pink one, a spotted one... I won't bore you with the whole list, needless to say it's extensive! Too bad she went manic and dumped me after 5 years. Her loss!
You know, I read a story awhile back about a guy who lost his penis in an industrial accident. They cut off one of his big toes and made it into a penis for him. I've heard of being fingered before, but that takes the cake! (True story.)
Sent from my Tablet
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In the '80s I was a kid, Radio Shack was the first place to go as I didn't have a car, and RS was in every mall.
This is what I remember:
- Battery club. There were two Radio Shacks within bike distance, and I had a card for each store. Once a month I'd get one free Red battery from each store. Radio Shack batteries were awesome. I still have two AAA gold alkalines that are still able to power up stuff and haven't leaked. They must be 20 years old.
- Connectors and wires. RS was the only place I knew of back then to get parts to make serial cables and monitor cables for Commodores.
- Parts. I enjoyed browsing for parts, I liked the blister packs of exotic parts with a little data book. Like the famous SP0256 and its even more exotic ascii to speech encoder. Expensive but got the imagination going.
- Books. RS had all the Mims books, like Getting Started in Electronics and those mini notebooks. Still have 'em.
Even as I started getting more "powerful" parts for my Commodore projects, I still got the VIC-20 expansion cards, DIP sockets and switches from RS.
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I love radio shack,last month I picked up a 70 watt soldering station for $45.00 and had a $!0.00 off coupon.
Works great.
Today I bought a ardunio kit for $ 50.00 off and a relay shield for $ 6.95.
It will be sad to see them go it appears the will keep the online sales going?
bill
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When they close for good you can be sure I'll buy up every last component for penises on the dollar.
When they closed here in the 90's they had wooden crates with prices/kg, just take a plastick bag and load it full with nice stuff and weigh it for the price. I broke even by selling fifteen or so Casio watches that were laying on the bottom ;D
The rest was stock for my hobby, i still have hundred switches, two hundred relays or so left over from them but don't use them that much and a lot of them were 110V rated :wtf:
But nowadays if such a large company would go bankrupt the curator will probably end up going to a massive online auctionhouse, and you end up bidding against dimmwhits that forget that they have to pay 25% more than they are bidding and pay more than it was when it was new. You see that now every time, some things haven't changed for the good :(
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Radio-Shack disappeared in Canada about ten years ago
They were replaced with "The Source by Circuit City"
When Circuit City went bankrupt, they were bought by Bell Canada and became "The Source"
For electronic parts, they are worthless. They are mainly a cellphone and gadget store. :(
But they sparked my interest for electronics in the late 70's and early 80's. :)
I loved their catalogs.
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html (http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html)
I learned Basic and assembly language on my CoCo 1.
My first electronic kit was a 25 in 1 from Radio-Shack.
My first multimeter was a Micronta.
My first breadboard was an Archer.
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Ask any broadcast engineer how many times a trip to RS kept/got back on the air, saved a recording studio session...
I think a savvy engineer should go and photo that parts kiosk at the back of the store and pool with other local engineers a full inventory between stations,
hehe retro: maybe a parts kiosk at the mall for commercial and makers.
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I came to the conclusion a long long time ago that Radioshacks UK operations were flawed, possibly affected by currency fluctuations, maybe temporarily propped up by the computer boom but you could almost see the tumbleweed blowing through the stores even in the 1970's The location of my then local one being a modern shopping arcade on the edge of the town centre probably didn't help. It was certainly a lot different to the traditional stores (we had two in the town I grew up in, one did mainly hi-fi with electonics as a sideline, the other mainly electronics with metal detectors and gadgets as a sideline) All were overpriced, but Tandy was off the scale for components although it did redeem itself with some choice bits like 8080's and all their support chips. RAM in white ceramic packages too. Be worth a bit to a retro computer geek now I suppose.
I can barely recall the last time I visited a Tandy (as it was in the UK) possibly 25 years ago or more as it was in a bit of town I'd rarely pass by and if I was in the vicinity I'd always be heading in the other direction. Last time I probably bought anything from them would be late 70's before Maplin took off with huge catalogues and their epic cover artwork, lots of data, far wider range of components than Tandy ever had. Phone ordering and very fast delivery (later automated phone ordering with DTMF iirc and then online with a V23 modem using a Toshiba twin floppy VGA monochrome laptop)
Anyway I digress, back to Radioshack / Tandy, I still have a few very well thumbed Nat Semi databooks / app notes (linear and TTL) that I bought from them!
The link in the first posting on this thread led to
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com (http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com)
Nostalgia time. My first multimeter top left, my second multimeter bottom left, maybe the second one was a kit, I know it was in the bargain bin and I had to replace a resistor or two.
Scary to think I used these on 240v mains :)
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Among all the memories of Radio Shack, perhaps my favorite thing was in the sales flyer ... four magical words: "where is, as is". When they'd clear out old models, it would end up marked down a lot, but not every store had every item. I still have the Tandy 102 computer (running my X10 home automation) which I bought in 1992 for US$50—my friend had called who worked for RS and said that Kodak (headquartered here) had returned a bunch for credit (which doesn't make sense, really ... maybe they knew they could sell them.)
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I came to the conclusion a long long time ago that Radioshacks UK operations were flawed, possibly affected by currency fluctuations, maybe temporarily propped up by the computer boom but you could almost see the tumbleweed blowing through the stores even in the 1970's The location of my then local one being a modern shopping arcade on the edge of the town centre probably didn't help. It was certainly a lot different to the traditional stores (we had two in the town I grew up in, one did mainly hi-fi with electonics as a sideline, the other mainly electronics with metal detectors and gadgets as a sideline) All were overpriced, but Tandy was off the scale for components although it did redeem itself with some choice bits like 8080's and all their support chips. RAM in white ceramic packages too. Be worth a bit to a retro computer geek now I suppose.
Looking back through the catalogues now I see what you mean.
At one point in the 70s, they had two catalogues: a retail one for consumer electronics and an industrial one for parts. Why didn't they keep it like that and branch into two separate businesses? Plenty of other businesses have been fairly profitable component distributors and retail. RadioShack tried to do both from small stores. They wasted a lot of money keeping many shops, stocked with parts, when they should have gone mail order.
I can barely recall the last time I visited a Tandy (as it was in the UK) possibly 25 years ago or more as it was in a bit of town I'd rarely pass by and if I was in the vicinity I'd always be heading in the other direction. Last time I probably bought anything from them would be late 70's before Maplin took off with huge catalogues and their epic cover artwork, lots of data, far wider range of components than Tandy ever had. Phone ordering and very fast delivery (later automated phone ordering with DTMF iirc and then online with a V23 modem using a Toshiba twin floppy VGA monochrome laptop)
And look at Maplin now, they're not doing very well either.
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Greetings EEVBees:
--I remember before RS and Tandy there was their grandpappy Allied Radio. As a matter of fact I just bought old Allied Radio catalogues on CD from eBay, see link below. I bought them to read and resell at a profit or just pass on to friends. I will post a few interesting pages when I get them.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/161027692720?_trksid=p2060778.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT (http://www.ebay.com/itm/161027692720?_trksid=p2060778.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT)
--I got the soldering bug early on, and was able to persuade my wealthier friends to buy kits and let me assemble them, so at one time or another, over lo the many years I built at least an example of every kind of kit there was. Allied Radio made some very good radio and electronic instrument kits, under it own name, and under the Knight brand. Also there were the beloved Lafayette Electronics, EICO, Paco, and Olson. But of course the holy of holy of holies was Heathkit, hallowed be its name.
--When I was in high school, my next door neighbor Mike, with me, drooling - I mean watching, built one of the early Heathkit stereo amplifiers. They sent us a duff tube, one channel was bad, so off to the Lafayette electronics store and for the seemingly huge sum of $5, Bobs your uncle. We managed to beg borrow and steal speakers and and old mono turntable which needed a new stereo cartridge and wiring, Lafayette again, although we could have gotten it for half as much from Allied by mail. The only stereo album we had was the eponymous "Peter Paul and Mary". We called them Pyotr, Pavel and Marina but being unsophisticated we loved the unsophisticated songs. One of the songs from the album was called Bamboo, written by Dave Van Ronk. It goes "You take a stick of bamboo, you take a stick of bamboo, you take a stick of bamboo and you throw it in the water, Oh Oh Oh Oh bamboo." After we listened to PP&M for 3 days running were kind of hoping that they would take that stick of bamboo and...
--I still love the smell of burning rosin in the morning.
"You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 1012 to 1."
Ernest Rutherford 1871 - 1937
Best Regards
Clear Ether
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Nostalgia time. My first multimeter top left, my second multimeter bottom left, maybe the second one was a kit, I know it was in the bargain bin and I had to replace a resistor or two.
...
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/radio-shack-recollections/?action=dlattach;attach=121703;image)
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I have the one top right. Bought it when I started electronics when I was 14.
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It's likely RadioShack will die soon - it's currently on life support!
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-radio-shack-20141201-column.html#page=1 (http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-radio-shack-20141201-column.html#page=1)
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I bought a couple of these pen multimeters about ten years ago, they're still going strong. They have a decent auto-shutoff, I think I've only replace the batteries once or twice since I've had them, and I do usually forget to switch them off. I had to do a contact clean on one of them a couple of years back, but they are super convenient, lacking only a high current option.
(http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d123/photobucket391/aa63d2c75ad15b91d6f564416f735d33_zpsc336c0e1.jpg)
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I have a Steinel one that uses the 9V battery as reference voltage. Continuity is defined as any resistance below 200k, which is rather useless seeing as the resistance range is from 100k ( the resistor in the flying end of the probe) to 300K.
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I logged many hours on one of these:
(https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1398/773052449_f4378e0250.jpg)
YES ! that's how i got started !!!
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Tandy Leather was founded Ft.Worth, Texas in 1919.
Radio Shack was started in Boston in 1921 as a ham radio retailer.
Allied Radio/Electronics started in Chicago, Illinois, back in 1929.
Tandy bought Radio Shack in 1963 and then changed their name to Radio Shack and then dumped their non-electronic businesses.
Radio Shack (nee. Tandy) bought Allied Electronics in 1970 and 4 years later the US Government forced them to divest Allied.
In the UK, they operated a chain similar to RadioShack in the UK under the Tandy name from the 1970s. Bought out by Carphone Warehouse.
Radio Shack entered Australia in 1973, and then Woolworths bought them out and merged the shops with their Dick Smith operation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Leather_Factory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Leather_Factory)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Radio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Radio)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack)
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In the UK, they operated a chain similar to RadioShack in the UK under the Tandy name from the 1970s. Bought out by Carphone Warehouse.
I remember that, I picked up dozens of N-BNC interseries adapters for pennies a piece as a result, still have them and use them now.
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I have a Steinel one that uses the 9V battery as reference voltage. Continuity is defined as any resistance below 200k, which is rather useless seeing as the resistance range is from 100k ( the resistor in the flying end of the probe) to 300K.
The Radio Shack one I posted the pic of hits continuity <50 ohms,
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The location of my then local one being a modern shopping arcade on the edge of the town centre probably didn't help. It was certainly a lot different to the traditional stores (we had two in the town I grew up in, one did mainly hi-fi with electonics as a sideline, the other mainly electronics with metal detectors and gadgets as a sideline)
I suspect the description is generic enough to fit many places but you seem to be describing where I grew up - the place that did metal detectors as well wasn't called "Modern Electronics" was it?
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ok. 'nuf cut-and-paste from the online catalog.
Let's show the real stuff :)
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/radio-shack-recollections/?action=dlattach;attach=121757;image)
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Aaaah, memory lane. I only had one meter.
Still I Dymo'd 'MULTIMETER 1' on it :)
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/radio-shack-recollections/?action=dlattach;attach=121759;image)
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...YES ! that's how i got started !!!
Somehow I knew that. I think that there isn't a single person in Belgium that has a heart for electronics that didn't start with one of those Tandy kits.
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YES ! that's how i got started !!!
I'm sure it sparked** an interest in many people - I certainly had one in my early teens although I can't figure out which one - I don't think mine had the little spring things to connect components - there was a PCB into which you inserted components mounted on plastic carries. The connections were 6 (possibly)8BA brass threads which went through holes in the PCB - I remember the transistors were on triangular yellow plastic carriers but can't find any images which match what I remember.
** sorry.
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ok. 'nuf cut-and-paste from the online catalog.
Let's show the real stuff :)
How about books?
Realistic Guide to VOM'S and VTVM'S by Robert G. Middleton. Copyright (C) 1972. First edition, third printing - 1974.
Transistor Projects volume 3 by Forrest M. Mims, III. Copyright (C) 1975. First edition, second printing - 1975.
Semiconductor Reference Handbook. Copyright (C) 1976, Radio Shack.
Or how about an electronic components surprise package from the 1970's? Full of various electronic and electrical parts. You never knew what you would get, but for a beginner who liked to experiment they were mostly worth the price.
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I think I still have the semiconductor guide here somewhere. I will have to go digging. I think mine has a blue cover.