[BrendaAnnD]

No cabinet, Murf. I bought the chassis from someone on ARF. Will have to get creative someday, since I have the Laureate and a 500H as well.

There really never has been a time when I wasn't repairing radios, though my skill levels did grow considerably over the many years. I started at about 13 or 14 repairing phonographs and the occasional television for friends. When I was 15, I went more or less 'professional' when I was hired to do repairs for a second hand store. Later, I got into radio broadcasting as well. My first job was a volunteer thing assisting the music director at a local station. I ended up with my own show a couple years later at a public station. Still later, I started doing broadcast engineering as a sort of independent tech. Through all of that, I stayed active in consumer electronics.

That all being said, there's always new things to learn.. all the little quirks and oddities of various particular brands and models. Though I could build a pretty darn good receiver (or transmitter) on my own, I still need to draw on the experience of others when it comes to troubleshooting some sets.

To answer your question about formal education, nope. Though I did sign up for electronics class in high school, I found I was so far ahead of what they were teaching in the class that it didn't work out for me. I learned a lot of theory through a sort of intuition, for lack of a better word. For instance, the basic function of tubes came to me just skimming a tube characteristics manual when I was 16. That's when it hit me, looking at the diagrams, that tubes were not really amplifiers in the true meaning of the word, but instead were linear switches controlling a large voltage with a smaller one.