This question seems appropriate here. Okay all, what is the one piece of TE that really got you started, the one piece that amazed you and made you want more.
For me, I was 10 years old and met a local HAM (Peter Griesbaum, WA7IFZ) who I would chat with on 10m SSB. He heard me complain about the Heathkit 0-12 scope that I could not get to work and offered me an HP 175A scope. The HP had the same 2 channel 40MHz vertical plug-ins and sweep delay shown in this photo (not my old scope). I was not able to carry it by myself, had my mom drive me by a strangers house after school to pick up this beast and put in the back of her 1982 Toyota corolla. We became very good friends and he was the one who taught me electronics.
Woooh... tough question. I was the weird kid who took everything apart using whatever tools came to hand; butter knives, steak knives and spoons suffered greatly at my hand. Starting when I was 8 or so, no small piece of machinery was safe from me; my grandmother would pick up broken alarm clocks from wherever to give me so I'd leave the working ones in the house alone.
When I was 10 or so, I started putting things back together... I made one working clock and another that kept time but the alarm didn't ding from the collection of parts that had survived in a shoebox in the back of my bedroom closet. When I showed grand-dad, he was dumbfounded.
All he could say was
"I thought I cut the cords off of those..." He had, but I scrounged cords elsewhere.
A year or two later, I'd found an old multimeter of his that the movement had frozen up on. I remember it being a Simpson 160, but that's wrong; it had a horizontal layout with movement on the left and knobs/jacks on the right, so
. By this time, the huge chest freezer in the back room of the old farmhouse was my "workbench" whenever grandmother didn't have a dog grooming appointment; one afternoon he came up behind me and watched over my shoulder without making a sound for close to an hour as I found the bit of rust that had jammed up between magnet & coil in the movement, then fiddled with a safety pin straightening the hair-fine clockprings so they didn't rub.
I didn't even realize it was him there, and I forgot about the presence behind me until I had finished adjusting the jewels so the movement was smooth and I could make it fully deflect with a puff of breath.
"Good work, boy..." he said, startling me. "Oh, Bah-Bah... I'm sorry. I know you said no, but I had to try and fix it for you..." I stuttered. "
Don't worry about that..." he answered.
"Let's see if we can find a battery for you to test it with."
He rummaged around in one of the drawers built into the cupboard wall between the kitchen and back room an produced a 9V battery; licking the terminals, he pronounced it
"Good enough..." and handed it to me. I checked the meter over one last time; stopping to fit the lens back over the movement and zero the needle before installing the battery. A bit of clear tape over the cracked lens corner that had allowed rust to get in, and I was ready to test it.
With deliberate care, double-checking the range, I set it to DC 10V range & tested the battery he'd given me; 8 1/2 ish volts looked okay. I moved the leads and installed the battery to test the ohmmeter functions. Everything appeared in order as I shorted the leads; I was able to zero out in each range with little adjustment.
"I think it's gonna work." I finally declared, handing him the probes. He handed them back.
"No... you fixed it; it's yours. How did you know how to set it up like that ?" he asked.
"I read the instructions." I smiled with no small measure of satisfaction, glancing over at the meter's storage case.
"Good... Good." he said, patting my shoulder with the faintest smile. Just then, grandmother called us to dinner.
"Come on; let's eat."*mnemories*
*sigh* No, I don't still have it.