| General > General Technical Chat |
| Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"? |
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| bd139:
rhb: some good points on EMRFD and Solid State Design there. I think people missed the point of those books (and the other DeMaw ones) which were to give you a set of problem solving tools and example use cases rather than a set of plans to build something. I am forever seeing scratch builds and copycat rigs everywhere. If anyone comes up with anything even slightly derivative (Farhan/Summers) then they suddenly get treated like the messiah. I think they just read the books properly! I reckon with a suitable choice of standard parts you can come up with your own QRP cult and followers (I have considered this :-DD) Same problem with a lot of the other books. Most of them weren’t recipe books even if the recipes did work. Lots of projects I’ve seen over the years were bits of familiar stuff glued together poorly in different ways. Sometimes mistakes were copied verbatim! On a side point I think the basic Mimms books, despite the following, were pretty bad. The circuit scrapbook series weren’t as bad but still suffered from the whole recipe book problem I mentioned above. Perhaps that’s another cult. On to Don’s books, I actually learned something with CMOS cookbook. That was a revelation. |
| rsjsouza:
bd139, I think you are missing the point when talking about derivative work: despite anyone can potentially read an advanced book properly, sometimes it takes someone to translate that advanced knowledge into something more palatable, and that is a skill on itself. I don't know Mimm's books, but I can figure from accounts and his following that he was one of these translators: heck, even when I was a kid I preferred the small electronics magazines with cartoonish drawings and simpler explanations but my father still subscribed to a very good (even for today's standards) more professional magazine. I remember browsing it without too much interest. |
| rhb:
DeMaw was trying to get people to build radios rather than just buy them. Their are 30-40 hams near me, but none of them build anything. But you have to judge someone's accomplishments in the context of their goals. Both Farhan and Summers are addressing the cost of radios. The only station I ever had was an AMECO single 6L6 xtal TX and an RF-2200 portable for the receiver. The reason was cost. I was in grad school pursuing my MS and had to earn the money during summers and vacations. At $139 in 1978, the RF-2200 was a major purchase. Summers QCX is quite sophisticated. And his YOTA 2018 design is very attractive. Farhan's BITX was a significant innovation in cost reduction. If I were licensed I'd get a uBITX in a heartbeat. The fundamental problem is the tendency for many people to to want to worship someone. The most you can do to counteract that is poke fun at yourself as Don does with the "Guru's Lair". Though after 20 years, you encounter people like the OP who don't get the joke. I dealt with it on my first contract by saying, "Obviously you have me confused with someone who knows what he is doing" whenever someone asked me a question I couldn't answer. At one point I counted 8 people in my cubicle per hour which was making doing my work impossible. So after a discussion with my boss we designated another person to screen questions. He was quite good, so the traffic was reduced to levels that allowed me to actually write code again. You can only understand things in the context of what you already know. So I routinely learn something whenever I read an old book I've used many times before. The "I'll look it up on the internet if I need to know" attitude is producing an entire generation which is completely uneducated despite spending 12-16 years in school. The most extreme example of mental context controlling understanding is probably the cargo cult in New Guinea. A C47 had crashed and the natives found all this cool stuff in the wreck. So they built a replica in hopes of attracting others. Their mental model for things that flew was birds and they had experience using decoys to attract them. |
| bd139:
Agree on all points |
| floobydust:
There's few people that published large circuit collections, back in the day when paper books and magazines were the media. I found Forrest Mim's circuits good for a kid or hobbyist starting out into electronics. Not perfect circuits but enough to give you ideas and have fun on the breadboard, at the Radio Shack level. Don Lancaster's work is very good, relevant even today there are subtleties he brought up nobody discussed. Walt Jung also did a few books full of analog wisdom. |
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