Michael A. Terrell wrote:
cl wrote:

The local ham club is looking for people to take classes with "Now
Your Talking" rather than try to find people with any electronics
background. I offered to help maintain their club equipment but they
brushed me off because I don't have a ham ticket. I still have a
half
way decent RF bench, but nothing compared to the $1,000,000 plus
benches
of test equipment I had at Microdyne.

That's all well and good Mike and no doubt you're a quite competent RF
tech, not even a discussion. But I think you're missing some critical
points here. Rumors to the contrary ham radio is overwhelmingly a
communications hobby, it is NOT an electronics hobby as such. Sure
there are any number of high-end electronics gurus who also have ham
tickets and exercise their skills on the bands, in the clubs and even
in this funny-farm of a USENET group. But they're not the heart & soul
of ham radio today for certain and I'm not particularly convinced they
ever were. In general the average ham learns as much about electronics
as he/she needs to satisfy their enjoyment of the hobby. Which on
average ain't much in this day of cheap whizzy plug 'n play equipment.
Beast on reality as you might but that's the way it is.

In this sense and given the obvious lack of interest in the arcane
details of electronics amongst the average members of the average
neighborhood ham radio club you should not have known that your offer
to participate was a no-counter. They don't "maintain" their radios,
they don't need your expertise, they simply ship their broken radios
off to the repair shops to get fixed. In short "Now You're Talking"
fits their agenda and your's simply does not. In another sense ham
radio clubs are private entities conventionally for hams and
prospective hams only. As an analogy what you did was show up at a
bow-hunters club with a .45-70 powder-burner and expect any interest in
an offer to "help".

--
Former professional electron wrangler.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

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