Staff quality at Radio Shack

[lstoskopf at cox.net]

Ian:  You aren't old enough to remember the old RS.  A lot of those employees were somewhat trained or already knew about electronics.  And they had a good stock of supplies.  Since their near death/near bankruptcy experience and down sizing there are no long term careers there.  Our two have a total of one guy who has been there a long time and knows whats what.  Sad that one side of the store has a lonely Sprint sales girl and the other an almost as lonely RS guy.  Most of the computer stuff is gone and they have cheap discounted electronic toys that are still cheaper direct from China on Banggood and the parts cabinets.  And I wonder who in Salina needs a SMA to BNC connector with fake gold....I've go plenty.

Now Amazon carries their own branded cables, etc. and if you have Amazon Prime you can get them in 2 days post paid.

Times changed a long time ago...

Speaking of changes: at coffee today we were discussing the movie: Bridge of Spies, which everyone needs to see.  Powers got shot down by a salvo of nearby missile explosions which stalled the engine.  The Ruskies finally had ones that could get high enough, but no accurate enough for a hit.  Which led to one of the group talking about one of his relatives working on our WW2 project on proximity fuses....the batteries available had a max shelf life or 4 months...supposedly a farm boy told the PhD guys that they needed wet/dry batteries like they bought for the farm.   Was told...ridiculous...how do you charge in a projectile....spin down the barrel would break the liquid container and activate.  Good story anyway.    

Which led to our discussion of the recent Russian plane.....heard yesterday that our guys reluctantly admitted that they saw two heat sources surrounding the affair:  one when the plane blew up and the other when it hit the earth.  I'm sure they didn't want to reveal too much that we could in real time pinpoint an isolated, unscheduled incident in a vast space on a fairly continuous basis.

And our Ham SDR guys are happy to be up to a couple of dozen SDR receivers on a PC +.  Barry was at Bletchley.  How many gals were there copying CW signals that now could be replaced by a good Skimmer app?

RS aside,  these are great tech times.

N0UU