Hello All! I am a retired video systems engineer who spent 45 years in electronics/communications, from being an Air Force ground radio repair tech (7 years) to being a video systems bench tech/field engineer (20 years) and finally a video systems engineer (designing and building video systems from edit suites to TV stations). I was also an avid electronics hobbyist for about the first 10 years that I was a bench tech. I used to buy the newest I.C.s and experiment with them. I found this to be a great aid to troubleshooting circuits in my job. Near the end of my bench tech days SMT was pretty much in all the gear I worked on. My favorite "thing to hate" was those little capacitors that developed high ESR and had to be replaced - usually ALL of them on a given board (maybe 20 or more in many cases). You had to twist them to literally break them off the board. This was a technique I was never comfortable with, but manufacturers (such as Panasonic) said this was the technique they recommended. I knew a fella that did consumer electronics repair, and he amazed me! This guy would actually take those little cameras & digital recorders apart (hooking up many test harnesses to be able to power them up) and troubleshoot them. By this time I had moved on to systems design (and glad of it!).
My hobbyist days pretty much ended in the late 1980's. I had designed and built signal detection circuits for my model railroad, designed and breadboarded a full function generator and a TV sync separator for my Heathkit scope, as well as a few interface circuits at work (customers always wanted to mix brands of equipment, and each brand had its own method of doing things).
A couple weeks ago I got interested in Arduino's and have gotten back into the "hobby". As mentioned here, it sure is different now! I'm still also interested in model railroading, and the tech used in that hobby is also quite complex now. SMT has made a lot possible in a small space. Unfortunately, my 71 year old eyes and dexterity are not up to that task! That said, using the modular approach (enter Arduino & Raspberry Pi) a hobbyist can still do a lot. As to discreet components disappearing entirely, I would be quite surprised if that happened in the near term - say the next 15 years - but I didn't think HDTV would take off as big as it finally did either (I saw a prototype HD system in Japan in the early 1980's, but it never went anywhere). Would you believe there were 18 HDTV formats being promoted in the 1990's?
I agree with other folks here that electronics repair is pretty much dying. Stuff is not made with serviceability in mind, ad board swapping is much more feasible than troubleshooting to the component level. Back in the day, we had to troubleshoot multilayer boards (printed circuit traces often 4 or 5 levels deep) and it didn't take anyone long to figure out these things are non-repairable.
Just my 2 cents.
My hobbyist days pretty much ended in the late 1980's. I had designed and built signal detection circuits for my model railroad, designed and breadboarded a full function generator and a TV sync separator for my Heathkit scope, as well as a few interface circuits at work (customers always wanted to mix brands of equipment, and each brand had its own method of doing things).
A couple weeks ago I got interested in Arduino's and have gotten back into the "hobby". As mentioned here, it sure is different now! I'm still also interested in model railroading, and the tech used in that hobby is also quite complex now. SMT has made a lot possible in a small space. Unfortunately, my 71 year old eyes and dexterity are not up to that task! That said, using the modular approach (enter Arduino & Raspberry Pi) a hobbyist can still do a lot. As to discreet components disappearing entirely, I would be quite surprised if that happened in the near term - say the next 15 years - but I didn't think HDTV would take off as big as it finally did either (I saw a prototype HD system in Japan in the early 1980's, but it never went anywhere). Would you believe there were 18 HDTV formats being promoted in the 1990's?
I agree with other folks here that electronics repair is pretty much dying. Stuff is not made with serviceability in mind, ad board swapping is much more feasible than troubleshooting to the component level. Back in the day, we had to troubleshoot multilayer boards (printed circuit traces often 4 or 5 levels deep) and it didn't take anyone long to figure out these things are non-repairable.
Just my 2 cents.