I like the old De Vry text books they are each about the size of an ARC magazine, and are broken up by subject starting with basic circuit and trouble shooting principals on up to color TV principals and servicing. You can go through them sequentially, and or cherry pick ones that deal with something your trying to trouble shoot here and now.

Tom C.

Well, Tony 'Trainman' and Dean 'dal61', you have heard from those who had full training, some training, and NO training. Ball's in your court.

The span of topics, never mind the sheer number of contributors here, tells you help and guidance is a click away. You are part of an International group here, who are all participating because of a love of things electrical and electronical. And yes, you can invent your own words too.

How many members love the cabinet restoration and woodworking part more than the electrical part?

Think of it in these terms- EVERYTHING you could possibly do wrong has already been accomplished by many of us already. Sometimes repeatedly. Yeah. So stop thinking in terms of 'wrongs', and think only about the 'rights'.

I had suggested here early radio and television books. One of the reasons why, is that test equipment was very basic, downright primitive. And often not very accurate. But, people fixed the radios and early TV's with this primitive equipment. You don't need a lot of fancy expensive equipment to see if you will enjoy this. A couple of good pieces will start you nicely. You don't need new, either. Go to the Classified section, and tell 'em what what you need. Like a vtvm and a signal generator. The kind of equipment which existed when the radio you are working on existed, as voltages and resistances on the schematics were taken with this type of equipment.

Sort through the suggested reading, and go for it. Just keep surfing Ebay for them, and wait for what you think works for you. OK, so you may have to surf for a bit before a full series of books comes up, or a book you saw mentioned shows up. Oh, and you should also get a tube guide. The RCA, Sylvania, and GE books are most common, and cover the vast majority of tubes. Yes, most of the tube info is on line, but I don't have a PC by the workbench for several reasons.

If you want in on the fun, then make your move.

John S.

You will find LOTS of people that enjoy sharing their knowledge and experience.----Here are ARF, I have found an amazing breadth and depth of knowledge---with people eager to help on all manner of questions.

Here's some of the books that I have that are great for helping someone out who is just starting:



The orange one on top is an old high school text book that was going to be thrown away (Goodheart-Wilcox build-a-course electricity, ISBN 1-56637-012-4). The ones below are the the 1958 edition of "Coyne Applied Practical Radio-Television", and are a wealth of knowledge about how radio and TV circuits, and a lot of components in them work, though you need a basic understanding of how more simple components work, as well as things like Ohm's law - but that's where the orange book comes in handy.

Last weekend I saw that a local book store has an older edition of the Conye books (plus another partial set). They were priced separately, prices ranging from $2 to $10 for each book. I could double-check sometime if you wanted me to, though. I might even be able to get the guy to cut me a deal on them. I got lucky with mine, an ARFer found then at an antique store for $2 each and sent them to me for cost plus shipping.

Update - Here's the Goodheart-Willcox one: http://www.amazon.com/Electricity-Goodh ... 566370124/ and amazon also has a wide assortment of the Coyne books: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=a9_sc_1?rh= ... television

Many great suggestions here with regard to books. I have a lot of these and they are all valuable.

One I really like for someone new to electronics and radio is Ed Romney's "Fixing Up Old Radios." His writing style is very friendly and the first few chapters on basics are very well done and easy to understand. There are also case studies of radio repairs which are well done.

-Kevin

Just remember , even the great Dr Frankenstein didn't build his monster all in one day , , , , He had to crack into a few corpses first , , and by the same measure you should be doing lots of practicing on "junk" TVs before ya crack into something you may want to keep ...

The road to electronic knowledge for all of us has been littered with fried flybacks and burnt components of every other description , and doing so on 'practice" sets can't be stressed enough . Once your comfortable enough in your skills , that's when you start working on the "keepers" .

Trainman, how's your math? Particularly, are you comfortable with using basic algebra to solve Ohm's Law and similar equations? Any trig?

The reason I'm asking is that I recently embarked on a "refreshing" of my electronics knowledge by taking the basic DC Circuits and AC Circuits classes at the College of DuPage. It was spectacular! I had so much fun I actually took several more classes. You have an outstanding local community college in the College of Lake County in Grayslake. However, the classes there seem a little more "serious" than the ones at COD. The math prerequisites are a bit stiffer. All you need for basic DC circuits is algebra, though. I would highly recommend looking into it!

As you're finding out, while everyone is recommending an outstanding list of books to read, without some basic understanding it's a tough slog.

trainman has not been on the forum since his last post to this thread---I hope we have not scared him away....

+1 on the math thing

Growing up, I was OK with algebra and basic trig, but not good with calculus. Somewhere in the process of settling down, I discovered how basic calculus made electronic circuit theory come alive---Now, many lost neurons later, my calculus has faded away, but I still use complex numbers for impedance---eg:
XsubL = j w L

XsubC = 1/ (j w C)

This simple notation takes care of all the phase shift and other fun stuff when dealing with filters, tuned circuits, etc.

Any way you cut it, it is helpful to have a basic grasp of how impedance affects both amplitude and phase in circuits.

((that thing that looks like "w" is "omega"---AKA the frequency in radians per second......w = 2 pi f))

Math, a good thing. Learn as much as you can.

I had a tough time with calculus in school, too. But it does give you new insights on how things work. Basically a dynamic perspective. For hobbying, I think its not necessary to teach AC theory with differential equations, and jumping between the time and frequency domain with Laplace Transforms. Of course, its make for lame jokes, when applied to feedback systems:

"Why did the Eastern European Airliner crash ? - Too many Poles on the right side of the plane "

Then again when your playing with FM, and you wonder why signal is spewing over more bandwidth, than you expected, look up the Bessel Function.

One of my past bosses used a math relationship, to make a simpler tape erase circuit, than our competition used. A perfect 50% duty cycle squarewave has no even harmonics, so our filter was simpler. A simple flip-flop rigged as a div-by-2 counter gives an almost perfect 50% duty cycle wave.

Finally that "j" is the imaginary component of a complex value. In electronics, complex numbers represent vectors of phase and amplitude, in a rectangular form, for simpler math manipulation. Imaginary in math only. Get your fingers across an imaginary 200V, and you'll find out its pretty real !

I still have a copy of "Elements of Radio" by Marcus for less than $7 on my book sale list. I just bumped it up in the Classifieds. Take a look there, its #18 on the list.

Mark Oppat
www.oldradioparts.net

I'm still here. I do have a lot of the texts quoted in this thread. I just get frustrated working on these things sometimes. Plus, I still don't have a organized and dedicated place set up to work on them. I'm getting into tv, only because I find them more useful than radio. Not much on the am dial anymore. I only have 2 radios with FM, and one I rebuilt gets used a lot. My am only radio restoration days are over, I think.

Tony, I am in the same boat as you but what i do not understand is since you are still having problems with radios why would you want to get involved with TVs? They are a lot more complicated . I mean a TV has audio and video not just audio.
Stan Ski

Thanks for the link to that site! I learned a lot from it and have only read 1 page.

I have about 10 TV's I plan on working on someday but I still need to master an AA5 radio myself. I have a bunch of books but it is hard to find one that is on the same learning level as I am. I found hanging out at a local TV repair shop really helped me out to learn some basics of modern electronics. I wish the guy worked on tube radios. I would have learned a lot faster by watching him. If you could find a TV repair shop around your area maybe you could stop in and ask to hang out for awhile. You might get lucky and find someone that works on the old tube stuff too.

This has been a very informative thread. Thank you for starting it Trainman.

Kris

Stan, radios are boring. There is nothing to listen to on the airwaves anymore. At least with a tv, I can input a vcr or dvd, or cable box. Yeah, I know with radioi i got a LP transmiter, but mine doesn't work so well. I rebuilt an amplifer,so at least I have my record player and cd player as inputs. Plain old am radios don't interest me anymore.

The way I feel about my knowledge level is like this. I know how to drive, but I have no clue how the engine works.

The point still is you can't dive in head first. TV's have alot higher voltages, and, are more complicated.
Start low, work your way up.
My boss had me working on radios first, and, learning to test tubes in tv's.
I had to work my way up.
Bill Cahill

If you do insist on diving in to TV, erhaps it may be worth your while to start with a Heathkit or similar. If you have the assembly manual for a kit-style TV it would be relatively easy to trace how thigns are conected and work together, as compared to one that has only a service manual.

I have a 1966 Heathkit color TV sitting here, and I hope to get started on it in the not too distant future, but I want to get what radios I have going first (well, at least the ones that aren't basket cases). Granted, this TV does work, I would like to get it properly recapped and adjusted. Perhapes even use it as a bedroom TV...

I am losing my grip on what your objectives are---I had thought that you wanted to learn more of the basics so that you could tackle fixing up TVs. In that context, many have suggested ways to learn the basics, including mastering the circuits used in a typical radio.
In principle, you could read the books and go straight to fixing TVs.....but what people are trying to say is that---if you are not comfortable getting a radio going, the likelihood of fixing a TV is pretty low.

All this aside, I think we might give better advice if we knew more about your current level of knowledge----including what kinds of repairs you have made (on anything)

I get what your saying. Read the books. I have read some of them. Ok, I don't always get what ii'm reading. I have rebuilt a few am only radios. I can muddle my way through a radio. Yes, tv is beyond my scope as far as understanding what all the circuits do.

What I don't know is current flow through a circuit, why a resistor/capacitor set up a oscillating circuit, ec. Basically, I can change parts, I can find bad parts, I just couldn't tell you why/how something works. And sometimes thats good to know in trouble shoting. Basically, i wish I could still go to school to learn radio/tv.

I was pretty much the same way until I started reading the fist Coyne book. It gives an excellent explanation of why and how each component works, as well as explaining about tuning/resonance, and now I'm partway through the explanation of how vacuum tubes work. If you at least get the first book in the series, it will help a tremendous amount in understanding how things work together.

These two sentences clearly indicate where you're a bit confused, and why you're struggling to get your head around what we're telling you.

You don't go to school to learn radio/tv. You go to school to understand current flow through a circuit.

After you learn current flow through a circuit,then you can learn how oscillators work, how an RF detector works, and how a receiver works.

And, then you'll start to understand how radios and tvs work.