My First Heathkit Oscilloscope
"Naku, itong si Ramon, kung anu-ano pinabibili sa Ate Josie niya. At para saan naman iyan? Sa hobby lang?" (translation: Darn this Ramon, what is all these stuff that you keep pestering your cousin Josie in London to buy? All this for just a hobby?") So complained my elder cousin about the first oscilloscope I asked my cousin working in London to buy for me (In fairness, even as he compalined to me, he did give me some instructions to aid me in clearing the importation). I was still in college. It was still the 70's then and importing things into the country was more restrictive than in it is today. Even for stuff like this you had to go through hoops and mazes with then Central Bank (with it's import regulations) and Customs, It was a nightmare, I recall. But was it worth it? Well one year later, it was the same elder cousin who found himself in a bind because he needed somebody to repair some "exotic" electronic geophysical measurement equipment somewhere in San Carlos University in Cebu. Days after I was on my first flight to Cebu, with my heathkit scope in tow. The faulty gear was some resistivity equipment which used a dc to dc converter to provide high voltage that you applied to the earth and while measuring voltage on a another set of probes. I was able to fix it and it was on a later talk with my cousin that he himself reminded me of the scolding he gave me a year ago and he then admitted "mayroon pakinabang pala!" (translation: It turns out the scope was not a bad idea at all). I felt really good that day! After I graduated college, I was recruited by my cousin for his new geophyscal instrumentation division which exposed me to radio telemetry, seismography (yes- earthquake instrumentation!), basic digital computing (our cpu had magnetic memory and paper tape storage!) in several training sessions in JA.
I sometimes ask myself: "what if I never bought my heathkit scope?"
