US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series

by adamnemecek • 11 years ago

95 26 11 years ago

I love stuff like this. We should have a site where resources can be bookmarked ... like pins if you will. And.. and we can follow certain topics of our interest. And we can call it Pinterest! And then we can keep hacker news for news :D

nitrogen• 11 years ago

It's the non-news that keeps me coming to HN. Current events are often of limited relevance to real life. Hearing about the latest manufactured controversy does zero to make me a better person. I'd much rather learn something of lasting value.

finnn• 11 years ago

On the same site: Navy Electronic Warfare Manual[1]

[1]http://jacquesricher.com/EWhdbk/

ganzuul• 11 years ago

It feels like a mistake to separate the literature on oscillators and amplifiers...

mpyne3• 11 years ago

Well, read the section on DC "amplidyne" motors and you'll see that their conception of an amplifier is more general than you might be expecting. :)

wumbernang6• 11 years ago

These aren't great to be honest. I've scanned through them in the past and there's a ton of missing stuff. You can read these and know what stuff is and how it works but not how to use it or any practical concerns. This is just a collection of facts.

Would recommend The Art of Electronics (just grab the 2nd edition and the student manual - it's fine) or Practical Electronics for Inventors.

Also stay away from Mimms books[1] and Make stuff. They're mostly glossy crap that doesn't actually have any content and are chock full of mistakes.

If you want to wire shit to an arduino, don't buy a book, just google it.

[1] Yes I know this is controversial but I started there and had to unlearn it all. It's a bad foundation.

k0doque• 11 years ago

As a budding a student of electronics, I found the mims book to be while not very rigorous to provide a good general overview and intuition on the field, which makes subsequent more "serious" more manageable, could you give more details as to why I should not read it?

wumbernang6• 11 years ago

1. Little explanation of how anything actually works which is crucial for intuition.

2. Some of the fundamentals are actually wrong, particularly in Getting Started in Electronics.

3. It deals with basic construction and very basic fundamentals only really.

If you want to build a kit, it's fine but if you want to create something, forget it.

invisible_dust• 11 years ago

After a time in the military myself, I find military resources to be somewhat suspect in terms of quality and accuracy.

wumbernang6• 11 years ago

True.

I worked for a military contactor and had to deal with what RAF 'engineers' did to our radio kit.

My current main scope, a Tek 453, was ex military and it had some after market repairs done by a monkey with soldering kit. Took me a couple of days to clean it up properly.

mpyne3• 11 years ago

These aren't great to be honest. I've scanned through them in the past and there's a ton of missing stuff. You can read these and know what stuff is and how it works but not how to use it or any practical concerns. This is just a collection of facts.

Well, they're not meant to get people on the way to understanding James Clerk Maxwell.

They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications.

So yes, everything about how this stuff actually works is simplified, and often even "dumbed down".

So I wouldn't use these guides as reference material if I were trying to take college-level versions of these courses as you'd just have to unlearn and re-learn too much to make it useful. But there's a method to the madness here.

weland2• 11 years ago

They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications.

The key here is "maintain, operate and repair".

Army training manuals are generally great for that.

They are not a resource to learn design from. If someone's objective is to learn how to make things, they're a very bad place to start.

weland2• 11 years ago

I don't disagree on the quality of these manuals (see my other comment), but for a beginner, The Art of Electronics is a very bad choice.

TAE is great if you've gone through university-level courses, understood (or at least was able to reproduce) the math but can't grok transistors without diagrams and formulae and know next to nothing about design principles.

For someone with no prior exposure, it's a terrible book. It explains very little about why things are the way they are.

Rules of thumb are great when you know what's behind them. When you don't, it's a shaky bridge to walk on.

wumbernang6• 11 years ago

Hence why I suggested the student manual which is a little more forgiving.

TAoE isn't something you read cover to cover anyway, it's a reference book.

jebblue2• 11 years ago

Actually the quality is superb. It is used to train many fine electronics personnel in the military. The military does not graduate people who do not know how to use what they learned or practical application.

bazillion• 11 years ago

I started on these books (we of course called them the NEETS modules) when I was 19 in electronic warfare school, and they are the exact same books that my dad used when he was an 18 year-old sonar technician in training. As others have pointed out in the thread, these are targeted towards an audience of those with an aptitude for electronics, and are therefore meant to give them a practical understanding of how to work with complex military electronic systems. You'll see mentions of things like electricity flowing from positive to negative and more complex concepts reduced down to simpler ones.

The whole point is to get someone from knowing nothing about electronics to being able to troubleshoot a system down to an offending circuit card, and replace the part. There are more advanced schools, such as the journeyman technician school, which works on breaking down some of the wrong information they might have picked up on over the course of applying these practical concepts, and building up enough knowledge to troubleshoot down to the component-level. That course will get them through things like back-plane wiring, ohm'ing out bad pins on cables that run through the ship (and therefore are impossible to easily touch end-to-end), and sometimes even gets to desoldering individual components on cards and replacing them, in order to save on paying Raytheon $4000 for a card that cost them $1.50 to make.

With that in mind, almost no one that goes through these courses actually goes on to become an engineer, or really strives to understand the true nature of the forces that make their systems possible. For the most part, you can take these students and give them a broken system with hot-swappable components and the schematics for it, and they could fix it. To me, that's the true measure of success of these books.

US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series

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