Making PCBs with Acetates?

[Nick]

Harsh, no, realistic, yes. I once had an engineer who worked for a simulation company state that "Nothing works out of the Elektor magazine, it's all just badly designed stuff". For an electronics engineer to make that sort of statement it does make you wonder what the criteria is when choosing projects to publish. Do they actually build one first before saying "yes, lets go for that", I doubt it.

I also remember the Modern Amateur Electronics Manual when it was available, made up of multiple parts over several months or years that never seemed to get anywhere. They went down the road of dodgy projects as well, one year out came a spoof april fools detector, WTF was my reaction, and due to other dissapointments, again another publication that was disconnected from my wallet.

Well, everyone has their opinion. Whilst I'm not a currently practising EE, I was a professional designer - bits of various aircraft radar systems etc. Now I mainly run projects rather than design, but I hope that I can still spot a ringer

All of Elektor's projects are built and tested in their labs and are often redesigned & tweaked before publishing - this can be for straight technical reasons or for component availability etc. They make mistakes, but so does pretty much every technical publication I've read. Note that Elektor's engineers are also "professional engineers" whose stock-in-trade is ensuring that the projects work as intended - their jobs depend on it. According to the December 2012 issue, 266,277 audited subscribers for their mags at the moment. What's the circulation of ETI or whatever its called today?

That's a point - you mention "The [Modern] Amateur Electronics Manual" - wasn't that an ETI publication - I'm pretty sure Elektor had nothing to do with that... http://www.epemag.wimborne.co.uk/acatalo...__MEM.html. ETI published a PIC-based spectrum analyser that was so wrong I wrote them a detailed explanation of why it was rubbish, and laid out in words of one syllable the underlying theory of FFTs. I had a nice letter back from the editor saying that he hadn't understood my letter, but they then printed a butchered version of it !

The one place that stuff might not be so rigorously tested is in their Summer Special edition of 100 projects.

Generally, I don't build their projects - I use them as a source for ideas and I prefer to design my own stuff. Many of the projects are authored by universities and EE companies and, for me at least, can be thought provoking. Their 300-series annual compendiums are also a useful reference as are their projects around new uPs, analogue devices and audio - I'm currently enjoying the FPGA series. Its made me pick up my VHDL manuals and refresh that part of my knowledge...

The blanket statement "Nothing works out of the Elektor magazine, it's all just badly designed stuff", is, to put it politely, absolute rubbish. A sweeping generalisation which is demonstrably untrue and manifestly unfair to the engineers in Elektor's labs.

DISCLAIMER! I have never worked for Elektor or written for them (though they have asked); I am however a long-time subscriber and they have used some of my rarer valves in articles...