My introduction to electronics occurred at about 10 when the family entertainment console stopped working. My dad showed me how to take the back off and remove all the tubes, and then sent me packing to the local drug store to test them in the tube tester. Well, all the tubes checked out but when I put them back in the set it was still dead. So, we hauled it down to the basement and I began to take it apart. It was a TV / record player / radio combo unit, and my plan was to extract the radio portion and speaker and put it in a wooden box for my bedroom. I pulled out the radio and power supply chassis and yoke harness. Having no clue as to which wires were needed I proceeded to cut out the yoke and a few other wires to the record player that did not seem necessary. I then plugged the power supply in and a small puff of smoke rose before my eyes. A failed experiment, but the disassembly adventure hooked me on all things electronic.

I would continue to take apart broken stuff and decided that if I was ever to learn how to fix them I would need to go to college. I enrolled at R.I.T. in the mid 70s to become an electrical engineer, the next summer I stopped in the local repair shop to look for work. I told the owner I had extensive experience taking consoles apart and testing tubes so he gave me a job. I would get ½ the labor charges for anything I fixed.

There was a large backlog; many sets just required new tubes or a squirt of tuner spray. Things were going well until I got down to those units that had more than just bad tubes. I was then given the schematics and a scope and the owner said “just troubleshoot 'em". Clueless as to which end of a scope probe to hold - my repair technician career was launched. The very next week I had worked a solid 40 hours trying to fix things and only managed to get one set out the door. The owner smiled and handed me a $20 bill that Friday afternoon and said "come back on Monday, you don.t really know what you are doing, but at least you try hard".

Well - after 5 cold years in Rochester N.Y. and a B.S.E.E in my pocket I decided to move someplace sunny. I landed at Hughes Aircraft Company in El Segundo California. While at Hughes I designed test equipment for T.O.W. missile guidance systems, and my official design engineering career began.

I was working on equipment whose sole purpose was to pop the top off enemy tanks by driving the uranium hardened spiked tip of the wire guided missile through the tank hull and then injecting super-heated plasma into the interior to fry the occupants. It was technically challenging but I was still hooked on A/V gear.

In 1983 I got a job at Mattel Electronics designing a dual standard color processor chip for the new Intellevision game console. I learned all about TV signal theory and then built a bread board that was later reduced to chip form that could produce multiple video formats by simply changing out the crystal. But alas one day the Mattel Board of Directors realized that the $200 million dollars of excess 1st gen consoles they had that had to be written off (oops!!). 6 months later the Mattel Electronics division was closed.

I was fortunate to find a new job at Amplica Inc. who built low noise amplifiers for radar and satellite receiver systems. I hired on as a video design engineer and began to work on the first digitally tuned satellite receiver system. At that time a satellite dish system was an all manual tuning adventure. You had L & R motor control buttons on the actuator unit, a polarity adjustment for the feed horn and an analog tuned receiver. There was lots of manual tweaking to get a picture.

The new receiver was all digital and had the actuator controller integrated into it. We even had a remote control (unheard of at the time for sat receivers) with preprogrammed satellite alignment for the dish. Now you could sit back, press a button to select a satellite and channel and poof, instant picture! Unfortunately the market took a dive with the intro of DigiCypher signal encryption. Consumers could then no longer get every channel available on every bird free and clear.