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December 1969 Radio-Electronics
 [Table of Contents]
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics.
See articles from Radio-Electronics,
published 1930-1988. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.
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From the beginning of
the electronics era in the early 20th Century and continuing throughout, technical
magazines like this 1969 issue of Radio-Electronics contained many articles
and advertisements purposed to attract people into the field. The military has always
been an excellent way to get both classroom and hands-on training on sophisticated
equipment, the price paid being one or more terms of enlistment. A plethora of civilian
schools offered classroom and home-study courses, but could seldom provide the practical
experience that could give a job applicant a boost in qualification over a "fresh-out"
candidate. Many people, including yours truly, combined both military and civilian
educations to achieve the desired career options. According to a Grok 3
AI query: "Approximately 10-15% of the electronic technician workforce in the U.S.
receives their primary training in the armed forces. This estimate is based on data
from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and reports from veteran employment
studies. Many veterans transition into civilian roles as electronic technicians
due to the technical skills and hands-on experience gained during military service,
particularly in fields like communications, radar, and avionics."
Careers in Electronics
 By Byron G. Wels
Technological progress coupled with automation continues to eliminate unskilled
jobs while creating an unprecedented demand for people with the background to design,
test and service complex new equipment.
Today's $20 billion electronic industry is expected to double in dollar volume
in the next 10 years. How can you become a part of this growth?
Electronic Aptitude
You might save a great deal of time and money pursuing a career field to which
your abilities are not suited by first asking yourself, "Do I have the aptitude
for a career in electronics?"
Each year, for example, a large percentage of the first year class at technical
and engineering schools "drop out." Many of them have an interest in electronics,
but quickly find this motivation is not enough to overcome a lack of needed technical
and mathematical aptitudes.
You might avoid disappointment and needless expense by first arranging to take
a battery of aptitude tests through high school guidance counselors, state employment
agencies or the psychology department at a local college. Many schools give preliminary
aptitude tests to applicants.
Training and Education
Once you've set your sights on a career in electronics, there are many paths
to your goal. First, the demand for personnel in the electronics industry is so
great today, that firms have established on-the-job training programs and hire trainees
without prior experience. Job training is coupled with classes in electronics, and
tuition refunds are offered to permit further study through correspondence courses
or at night school.
 What about self study? Bookstores can
provide study material covering basic electronics, but this approach demands considerable
self discipline and motivation. Due to the diversity and growing complexity of the
field, it's becoming more and more difficult to organize a worthwhile self-study
program. Employers prefer some evidence of formal study - a degree or certificate.
Military training not only offers a means of obtaining electronic skills but
can be a rewarding career in itself. Increasingly, the armed forces are recognizing
the importance of career-oriented personnel and are rewarding them accordingly.
Many civilian electronics technicians and engineers began their careers in military
electronics, furthering their education later under the GI Bill.
Two-year technical schools offer excellent training. Proprietary or private schools,
the best of which require high school graduation for admission, stress theory and
equipment training. Many have night school and correspondence programs. A growing
trend in technical education is the community college or public institute. These
two-year schools offer Associate of Applied Science degrees, and program humanities
courses, that private technology schools usually do not include.
Correspondence courses have the advantage of letting you set your own study pace.
Study material is prepared by experts and you receive professional guidance through
the mail. Most of the larger schools offer sequences in several areas, such as radio/TV,
computers, industrial electronics, communications, etc.
A B.S. degree in electrical engineering is generally required to become an electronics
engineer, although there are other means: Federal and state civil service boards
set training and educational requirements for professional engineer ratings, as
does the IEEE. Some companies assign engineering titles to employees without B.S.
degrees. (Salaries, however, do not necessarily correspond to titles, and skilled
technicians sometimes earn more than engineers.)
Industrial Electronics
Industry is desperate for trained men at all levels, from engineers on down.
Work in industrial electronics is widely diversified, depending on the field you
choose, and the areas in which you are interested. You'll find openings for production
and production control people, where the concentration is one of selecting areas
of mass production suitable for automation, and the design and implementation of
this automated equipment. Where automation is not feasible, studies are made to
break the work down in stages that can be most easily handled by a given group of
workers.
 The quality control group concentrates its
efforts in seeing that the company product is up to required standards and specifications.
This is done by a series of tests on the product with sophisticated test equipment.
The Q/C operators must be thoroughly familiar with the use of meters, oscilloscopes,
and related equipment.
Maintenance men keep the exotic test equipment used in the lab and shop in peak
working condition. They see to it that laboratory standard equipment is well-calibrated
by periodic checks, and remove equipment to the maintenance shop on a routine basis,
for clean-up and test. No product is ever more accurate than the equipment used
to test and align it, so the laboratory maintenance crew does a critical and important
task.
But probably the most interesting work goes on in the research and development
lab. Here, the prototype equipment is built, that starts with a basic idea, and
comes out completed and packaged. Here an engineer works up his diagrams, and turns
them over to a lab technician. Consulting with the engineer, they come up with a
breadboard model for preliminary testing. Then a finished unit is assembled.
Along with all of this, the industrial field offers such other tasks as writing
technical manuals, preparing blueprints and drawings, and even technical electronic
photography, a field in itself!
Career in Communications
Today, more than ever before, communications is coming into its own in a big
way. What with transatlantic signals being bounced off echo satellites, with space
pioneers depending on communications with the ground, technology is becoming more
and more crucial every day. Without communications nothing can move, whether it's
a business radio installation in a fleet of oil trucks to an elaborate intercontinental
radio telephone system. This equipment must be manufactured, installed, and maintained.
Communications goes even further. A part of this vast complex includes ship-to-shore
radio phones, and a vast array of accessory equipment for ships of all sizes, including
radar systems, depth sounders, and a complex net-work of radio navigational equipment
both on ship and ashore.
Closely related to this are the necessary communications and accessory equipment
used by the air services. These include multi-frequency transceivers, coupled with
Omnirange transponders. The omni system brackets the nation, with stations spread
overland to form a network of highways in the sky. Along with these, one finds the
distance-measuring equipment, weather radar, auto pilot systems, radio altimeters,
and other electronic devices necessary to assure the safe completion of every flight.
You also find an elaborate complex of communications equipment on the ground as
well, with most major facilities offering radar and control transceivers, and even
the smallest airports equipped with Unicorn transceivers to provide pilots with
landing information.
Career in Broadcasting
The appeal in broadcasting is usually one that permits you to rub shoulders with
celebrities. If you plan to break into this highly competitive field, you will probably
start, as most of those who are successful in this field did, at a small radio station
out in the hinterlands. In a small station, you do double-duty. Your day might begin
at five in the morning, when you turn on the transmitter, and sleepily make the
morning identification. You might then read the early news, and run a DJ show for
a while. But to do these things, you must have an FCC license!
Many of today's top disc jockeys still proudly retain their second-class commercial
tickets!
In television, you can go into audio work, camera work, and even make it in the
control room.
Career in Servicing
Do you like dealing with the public? Do you enjoy meeting people? Perhaps a career
in radio and television repair is your dish.
The basic philosophy here is that a set worked once, then something went wrong,
and it stopped. Fix what went wrong, and the set will work again until something
else goes wrong. The radio/TV service technician knows how to find what's wrong
quickly and correct the trouble.
In the larger repair facilities, two types of technicians are employed. The "outside"
man is skilled in dealing with people, and making minor, emergency repairs. He can
do the small alignment jobs, install antennas, change tubes. But when he runs into
a set with really tough problems that require some fancy test equipment or a major
repair, he takes the set into the shop for the "bench" man to work on.
The bench man stays in the shop, is usually a highly skilled technician. He works
behind the scenes. When something goes wrong that the outside man can't fix, the
bench man gets the job. He restores the set to factory specifications, and then
the outside man returns it to the customer. R-E
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