Digital Narnia

Premier of the new 'Chronicles of Narnia' film 'Prince Caspian' (Edmund, Lucy, Susan, Peter and Prince Caspian)

Back in class 5 at primary school we had a brill teacher called Mr Dewhurst. He read us 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' and then 'Prince Caspian' in class. I was totally begotted with the first story. When I became a teacher myself I have read these to the children and they love it! The british cartoon version of the story is super and Jacquie loved to watch it. The BBC version was disappointing, especially when Lucy asked "Are you a Faun?" having never seen or heard of one before!!
Now we have the digital versions...
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is fantastic, the whole school went to watch it at the cinema and loved it. Now comes the next bit ... Prince Caspian! I must admit that I didn't fully understand this story when I was in Year 3, but I can't wait to see the digital film version!

Jazzy FM - Digital Radio!

Jazzy FM is our school internet radio station!

Radio...but not as we know it...making radio broadcasting accessible to all through on-line radio.

An intresting concept because it has meant that children in my class at school now control their own station through RADIOWAVES - an on-line facility for children to safely create their own Podcasts and broadcasts using MP3 digital recording then publishing them onto the school radio station.

We have been doing this for a couple of years, but now I am launching our new JAZZY FM station. We use a program called 'Audacity' to edit and produce podcasts.

www.radiowaves.co.uk/jazzyfm

Check out other stations on Radiowaves!

http://www.radiowaves.co.uk/

Analogue Holiday!

Talk about a working holiday...how about three weeks in a holiday camp!

Monday morning July 1972 and I have just returned from a week in Wales with Mum and Dad. Arrive at work and am told "How do you fancy a couple of days at Pontins?" "Great!" I said. Right...need you in that lorry at 9.30 to Rhye...rush job!!!

Err...I have no money....or clothes....and my Mum and Dad don't know! "No problem" says Martin Foy, my boss. "Send you some money and we will phone Mum"

So off I went with Brian to join a load of other TV Engineers at Camber Sands on the South Coast in glorious weather!

The mission...to replace 900 duff televisions in 900 chalettes at Pontins at Camber Sands with new ones.

Alice Cooper and Hawkwind were at the top of the charts and Mungo Jerry 'In the summer time' was about to become number one. I remember watching Top of the Pops in the chalette were we stayed for the first week and a half until we got thrown out! We stayed for the rest of the time in a pub in Lydd which was great!

'Slot TV' was the analogue buzz word then...you put 50p into the slot in a box on the back of the TV to watch the television for a couple of hours.

Today's digital equivalent is 'Pay as you view' on SKY or VIRGIN MEDIA...but no slots!

Back at Camber Sands we struck some good deals with the punters by bypassing the slot. I remember doing this with a group of great girls from Camber Sands who worked behind the bar ... result...cheap (and free) beer!

In the last week it was my 18th Birthday my Mum and Dad sent me a 'TELEGRAM' to the camp. I was amazed how this crude analogue device managed to find me on my birthday. The girl at reception made a big thing about it and anounced it over the camp loadspeakers!

Speaking of which...we managed to get hold of a 'LOAD HAILER' and at 7.00 in the morning we drove around the camp (ten in the van) shouting 'MORNING CAMPERS!!!' (No wonder we got chucked out!)

A fantastic three weeks and I came back in the clothes I went in!

BBC Computer

The BBC 'B' Computer...digital icon!

In 1989 I 'upgraded' my computer system to the famous BBC 'B' Computer. Before this I used my Sinclair Spectrum, which was a superb machine!

In 1989 I gave up my job in electronics to start a PGCE course at Uni, my placements involved teaching ICT to students using the BBC 'B' computer. Gosh...I remember teaching 24 hairdressing students at Salford College using BBC computers, quite an experience!!

I set up a bench in the loft with my BBC computer along with monitor, 5 1/4" disc drives and dot-matrix printer. I had a pile of computer software on floppy discs. I used this set up to complete my assignments for Uni and print them out for submission (I still have them in the loft!!) I remember once having to meet the deadline for my final assignment and spending two nights typing in my work on 'WordStar' then closed down the programme before saving my work! In those days you didn't get a message that said 'Do you want to save your work?'

I lost it and stayed up all night typing it in again!

I used my BBC to back up and repair copies of the BBC software at school, a wonderful machine, but expensive. In 1989 it would cost £350 plus disk drive and software. I bought mine for £150 including two disk drives and software.

I sold my Sinclair Spectrum and used the BBC for a while until taking the plunge and buying a new PC!

BC108 Analogue Gem

The BC108 transistor along with it's companion BC107 and BC109 became the heart and soul of project building! This general purpose silicon device (which sort of replaced the old OC71 germanium device) could be used for audio pre-amps, drivers, oscillators, multivibrators and even switches. I even used them to replace odd sounding NPN transistors in televisions, audio units and video recorders. Faulty japanese and foreign transistors that were impossible to find or expensive to order could usually be replaced by this lovely 10 pence little gem!

Later, the black plastic BC148 came along which was the printed circuit version and the BC158 which was the PNP version.

You can still buy the BC108 at Maplin and Modern Radio...

An analogue gem!

Analogue Daleks!

Not what it seems...this famous Amstrad HI-FI system looked good in the corner of a living room, but was probably the worst audio system in the world! Not seperate units, but four big screws that lowered the whole front panel built into the wooden case. Record Deck a waste of space and speakers rubbish. These objects were like Daleks and would often take over the workshop as they were so unreliable! In the words of Alan Sugar (Managing Director of Amstrad) "Your Fired!!"

I stumbled onto this while searching for a picture of the old Thorn 3000 chassis! I could have changed some of the words to make it sound like my own experiences and believe me...it is all true!

MORE SHOCKING EXPERIENCES
By Jim Ollerhead
"I vividly remember getting a 'belt' from a CRT final anode, especially the Thorn 3000 series colour TV. This was a panel-swap model, the guys in the field just changed the circuit boards and we fixed the panels back in the workshop; we used to sneeringly call the field engineers ‘panel pushers’. Anyway when you got a shock from this TV you involuntarily snatched your hand out from the box-shaped chassis and all the soldered joints under the panels left a fine lattice of scratch-marks on the back of your hand, eeeeek! Happy days, not!

Working inside the back of a colour TV can be a hazardous business, especially to the backs of the hands...

When I first joined Rumbelows black and white 405-line TVs were still around but they were being phased out as I started my early career as a telly engineer. This was at the beginning of colour broadcasting in the UK and Beeb 2 used to show those peculiar European test transmissions, or just a test card.

The first sets I worked on were Baird valve jobs in huge spine-breaking cabinets. As an apprentice I used to go out with the "collect and loan" bloke. At the time there were also loads of black and white dual-standard (405/625-line) sets around with a 12-inch long system switch across the back of the circuit board. This was often the main cause of problems and was usually fixed by some judicious squirting of Genklene whilst vigorously waggling the switch side to side. It was then topped off by a final spray of Amberlube, which didn't evaporate like Genklene

There were lots of Baird mono TVs around back then, but my favourite was the Thorn 1500 model because it was such a doddle to fix. It always brings to mind the Led Zeppelin track Black Dog (on LZ4) that has a line in it that says "I don't know but I been told a big legged woman ain't got no soul". Amongst my fellow engineers this became: "I don't know what I been told but C98 got no frame hold’. C98 was the bypass capacitor for the PCL805 frame oscillator valve and it used to fail regularly and cause a rolling picture in the 1500.

Don't even get me started about setting the static convergence on a Thorn 3000 TV, trying not to let your hand tremble as it twisted the circular magnets on the (bloody high voltage) scan coils, whilst trying to hold a mirror and looking at the cross on that 'orrible kid's chalkboard on Testcard F. it's amazing any of us survived!

70s TVs like this one relied on replaceable circuit boards or 'panels' that were swapped by a visiting engineer and then taken back to the workshop for repair

We used to carry with us workshop-cobbled "tube-bashers". I think the circuit came out of the now-defunct Practical Wireless or Television magazines and consisted of a few components but it had a quite impressive 60W light bulb on the top that flashed as the basher did its work. Basically it hammered the cathode of the tube to try and burn off accumulated deposits to eke a few more months’ life from the picture tube after the images had begun to take on a 'silvery' appearance.

I well remember power supplies in Thorn 3000 series TVs, These had large ‘dropper’ resistors and after a while they began to look like a bunch of grapes. They failed frequently so engineers just ‘bridged’ the faulty one by soldering on new droppers.

Latterly I became the "audio bloke" and this coincided with the influx of cheap and crappy music centres, which took over from coffin-shaped radiograms. There was one long standing problem with a Waltham music centre. It kept coming into the shop with blown output transistors and I couldn't understand why. It was fixed checked and sent out in fully working order but the next day it always came back.

The ubiquitious 1990's 'music centre, this one is a cheap and cheerful fake Hi-Fi stack system and the bane of service engineers

It finally dawned on me that when you screwed down the transit screws on the record deck -- two big fat screws that stopped the deck falling off its coiled spring legs when it was being moved -- the deck touched the heat sink tag of the output transistors. If the transit screws were not undone as soon as power was applied the transistors blew.

Another music centre I’ll never forget was the Thorn Pilot, I even bought one. I thought it looked really compact and neat with it’s rounded contours. The problem with this one was the tuner cord -- basically a string that connected to the tuner knob to a pointer that moved along a tuning scale. The cord path was a bit of a nightmare (as were many others) because if you had never seen it threaded up and it snapped, trying to guess the route the cord took around the pulleys and tuner spindle was a near-impossible task. Of all the things I hated most about being Mr Audio, restringing tuners was the worst.

It wasn’t only music centres that caused me grief. Some customers seemed to think that if the tape reels in a Compact Cassettes stopped turning a liberal dose of 3-in-1 oil would free it up. In fact the mechanism was quite complex and relied on friction to work properly. I got so pissed-off with people's DIY efforts to fix cassettes that I wrote a two-page article, which was published in Amstrad Action magazine.

During the early 1980s the pace of technology was accelerating and a friend at Rumbelows lent me a Sinclair ZX80 computer. I recall being thoroughly amazed at this tiny machine's ability to allow you to type instructions into it and to actually follow them. This was the dawn of my desire to find work as a programmer. I have worked in IT for some 22 years now but it's all too easy to forget those early days.... "

The AVO 8 - analogue battleship!

I've got to agree with this, the AVO 8 was a suberb instrument. The one I used to own was the next model up, just different knobs. When I left Servicescope I should have kept hold of the AVO as it was mine! It fit nicely into a Mothercare box and went everywhere with me!

"In my opinion you are now looking at one of the finest electrical test and measuring instruments ever built and until a few years ago, if you ever needed to have a piece of electronic equipment repaired there’s a very fair chance an AVO meter, and quite probably a Model 8, had something to do with it.

By current standards the AVO 8 is fairly basic; all it does is measure AC and DC voltage and current and electrical resistance. You can buy a pocket test meter in Maplin for under a tenner that does all that, and quite a bit more besides, and probably more accurately -- but I absolutely guarantee it will not be still working in 40 or 50 years time. AVOs even older than that are still in daily use. What an AVO 8 and analogue meters lack in fancy features they more than make up for with the extra information they provide about the circuits they are being used to test. It takes a while to learn and understand the behaviour or a wiggling moving coil meter but it’ll tell you more than a bunch of digits ever will. However, what really sets the AVO 8 apart from almost every other test meter is its rugged construction. In short it’s built like a brick outhouse and can take a ridiculous amount of physical punishment, and if you do abuse it electrically the fast mechanical cut-out usually saves the day."

They don't make 'em ilke that anymore!!