@Mister X Can you please specify what date this magazines was issued? I would like to find it, It is extremely useful, Thanks for sharing the photos
Homer L. Davidson is The Dude!!! He is like Isaac Asimov in electronics: types at the speed of sound! I bought quite a few of his books off Amazon, easy and sometimes even entertaining read. The best thing about him: he is not trying to teach you Ohm Law, but just shows that 99% of repairs can be done by a baby Recommended!!! I did a self-“fact check” and Wow! He even wrote a book on fixing garden tools
The date is on the edge of the pages Radio Electronics September 1982 I guess the scans came from https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Radio_Electronics _Master_Page.htm
I got it from the Wayback Machine, here's a link and you can download all 42 issues! It's September 1982, just like Longman said. Post if you find anything interesting. https://archive.org/details/RadioElectronics_422?q="portable+cassette"
Having posted the link I just had a look at the whole Radio Electronics magazine. As Spock would say "Fascinating". For me it is difficult to see who it was aimed at, with adverts for Tektronix, and the Sinclair ZX81 in the same magazine. At one point we had ten or more Electronics magazines on the newsstands. However, most were aimed at Hobbyists, for whom buying a piece of Tektonix equipment would be as likely as buying a Ferrari (i.e unlikely unless it was twenty years old). The ZX81 was closer to the computing equivalent of a Trabant The learn electronics adverts are somewhat familiar, but in the UK the most well known course, which a schoolfriend (with rich parents) did had the main project as building a very simple oscilloscope with just two vlaves (tubes) a diode and a CRT. If you could afford a 25" remote control TV you were very unlikely to need electronics training. In the UK "Wireless World" magazine was aimed at very experienced hobbyist and professionals but checking through the September 1982 issue there is only one advert for professional test equipment, and one of the projects is to build a simple oscilloscope. In practice most experienced hobbyists, and even people like TV repair men would have had a Government surplus oscilloscope from the 1960s, or a very basic one made by a small company like Telequipment in the UK. Companies like the large Aerospace corporation I was working for did have all the latest test equipment but the prices were outside the range of anyone else. In the mid 1980s, on my suggestion, they bought our department a Philips 4 beam oscilloscope, as we kept borrowing one from another department. That was about £3000 when my salary was £7000 a year and you could buy a new house for £22000. p.s I guess the Sharp talking copier in the news section was as successful as the BL Maestro Talking Car.
Since I've been speedreading through hundreds of these I've thought the same thing Longman, but early on computers were part of the home-built electronic crowd and I can kind of see the cross-over until the early 80's. While the high end gear is amazing it was out of reach for just about everyone, I think the oscilloscopes we had in school were those military surplus, nothing remotely similar to the magazine was available, even a cheap multi-meter wasn't cheap. The projects is what draws me, besides the cool ads and some of the features, some of the builders might have gone on to make better versions of the plans and are now running companies making millions of these "normal" items.
Once I got to the back of Radio Electronics it looked far more familiar with adverts for Soldering Irons, transistors etc. During the 1980s and 1990s we had Tandy (Radio Shack) over here selling a very similar range to their USA catalogue. My first multi-meter came from them, bought as a reward for helping my Father tile the pantry. I spent an hour or so looking at different magazines from the same month of September 1982. There were some really interesting facts in the editorial of Televison Magazine ,which was very much aimed at the local TV repairman, back when every village had one, (usually doing rentals as well). https://www.americanradiohistory.co...ision/80s/Television-Servicing-UK-1982-09.pdf In 1981 "VCR production accounted for over 70% in value of the production of the Japanese consumer electronics industry" Despite the smaller population over 1 million were delivered in the UK, 2/3rds of the number in the USA/ With only three TV channels here and very little cable TV, VCRs and home video rentals were a booming market back then. Regarding projects many of the complex ones were very quickly outdated, either by cheaper commercial equipment or, especially in the case of electronic games, a program on a home computer. I wonder how many people actually built the Elektor TV games computer, with the games distributed on 45RPM Flexi Discs ?
