Chatting with a retired TWA guy at the diner about old test gear

I was having coffee at the airport diner yesterday and got talking with a retired tech who worked on L-1011s. He said, 'We used to find more faults with a multimeter and a schematic than you kids do with a whole rack of fancy gear.' It stuck with me because I've been leaning hard on the automatic test set lately. Made me wonder if I'm skipping the basic signal tracing steps too fast. Anyone else feel like the fundamentals are getting lost?

3 comments

3 Comments

tessap981mo ago

Yeah that reminds me of a piece I read last week about how modern techs sometimes miss the forest for the trees. The article said all the auto-test gear is great for speed, but it can make you lazy about really understanding the signal path. You just trust the pass/fail readout instead of knowing why it failed. It's like we're losing the art of just listening to a circuit or following a voltage step by step.

bettyhunt5d ago

Saw a tech fix a board by just tapping it.

nora_wood431mo ago

Totally get what you mean about losing the art.