Once again, for the clueless, read Mark Zenier's guide to the
sci.electronics.* hierarchy,
ftp://ftp.eskimo.com/u/m/mzenier/seguide9706.txt
Hi Michael,
I decided to celebrate catching up with a 6 month backlog of this group
(largely by tossing out most of the noise and crap) with a rewrite.
Comments, anyone?
Viewers Guide to the USENET sci.electronics newsgroups. [March 24, 2007]
This FAQ is a tourist's guide to the various electronics newsgroups.
Some Comments and Q&A.
Some things to remember. These newsgroups are worldwide in coverage.
That means that criticizing someone's English, making nationalistic
remarks, personal insults, and criticizing another poster's intelligence
are invitations to pointless flame wars.
And the computer equipment that will be used to read these messages is
anything but uniform. Any extensions that your computer has to support
various character sets will not always be reliably transmitted or
displayed at the other end. So avoid fancy superscript characters,
degrees temperature, Greek letters, and line drawing characters like the
IBM PC extended character set. There are newer standards for indicating
the character interpretation to be used with a posting, but there's no
guarantee that the person on the other end is up to date.
You should also consider where a poster is when they request the closest
source for some product or information. Not everybody has a Radio Shack
in the nearest shopping mall. A common problem is that the toll free
800 numbers common in North America are not easily or cheaply accessible
from the rest of the world. Look closely at the originators domain address
to see if they can contact your recommended source.
Keep in mind that various systems and standards are different around
the world. Household power voltages and frequencies are different,
and the techniques and regulations to deal with wiring are different
enough to cause safety problems if you try to use the wrong one.
Video systems (originally tied to the power line frequency) are also
widely different around the world. Different scan rates and encoding
systems make things incompatible. More recent innovations are even
more diverse. For example, stereo audio on television transmissions
in the UK, Scandinavian countries, and other parts of Europe is a
almost CD quality digital transmission, while in the US, the MTS system
is a variation on the analog sub-carrier system used for FM stereo.
Not only are the systems different, so is the jargon used to describe
them. What might be a Ground Fault Interrupter in North America, would
be a Residual Current Circuit Breaker across the Atlantic. And what was
written as 4.7 k ohms, might by (from the requirements of the schematic
drafting standards) be given as 4k7 ohms.
Q. "Someone has to give me an answer!"
A. Nope, sorry. Everybody here (except a few salesmen) is doing it
for their own purposes, and no question is guaranteed to get an
answer. Getting obnoxious about it, or repeating the question
across every possible newsgroup, or over and over again won't win
any friends and marks you as the archetypical "newbie".
Q. "Just GOOGLE it"
A. If that's going to be your followup post, just shut up and
save the bandwidth. By this point in time, (after Google
has been running a dozen years), everybody knows about it.
At a minium, give the search terms and a critique of a few
of the more useful sites that you found in doing that search,
with direct URLs.
Q. "What is cross-posting, and is it bad?"
A. Cross-posting is where many discussion group names are included in
the "Newsgroups" header of a posting. This causes them to be
distributed to each of those newsgroups when they are received
and processed at a news server. (Note that Usenet is not like
the World Wide Web. In contrast to the Web, postings are
distributed worldwide to thousands of separate computer systems,
so sending just one message instead of many is beneficial.)
Like many feature of Usenet news, it can be abused. For
example, Posting to large numbers of groups at once, or posting
to groups that have incompatible discussion topics as a form of
harassment. This has gained it a bad reputation that the
dogmatic have converted into legendary restrictions.
Try to limit posting to the one newsgroup whose topic matches
your subject. If it does seem to overlap a couple of newsgroups'
topics, cross-post if you must.
You should avoid multiple postings. This is where you send a
separate posting to multiple newsgroups. This causes several
bad things. It creates that much more data that each news
server system has to process. It starts a separate disconnected
discussion thread in each newsgroup. And it causes for anyone
who reads many of the newsgroups to see the posting repeated for
each group. Any competent newsreader software will only show
a cross-posted message to the reader once, but has no way of
dealing with these seperate discussion threads.
Q. Are advertisements restricted to ONLY
misc.industry.electronics.marketplace?
A. That's the idea.
Q. Why can't I advertise my [stereo/computer/...] for sale in
misc.industry.electronics.marketplace?
A. For the main reason the group is for an audience that isn't
interested in buying them. (Note the word 'Industry' in the
newsgroup name. If you can buy it at the nearest shopping mall,
it doesn't belong here). And the second good reason is there
are already well established groups for those purposes. Try the
misc.forsale.computers groups, rec.audio.marketplace, rec.video,
or rec.radio.swap
Q. Can I post graphics images to these groups.
A. As a consideration towards small sites and users that use
automatic downloading software, the text groups in the big-8 news
hierarchies are generally off limits to binary content posts.
This is enforced by filtering software at the news servers.
Either your posting will get rejected when you try to do this,
or it will get dropped when processed as incoming news at another
news server. So a large part of your audience will most likely
never see it.
Binary content postings are allowed in the alt.binaries hierarchy.
The newsgroup alt.binaries.schematics.electronic (Note the usual
Usenet reverse polish naming convention) was set up to support
postings of images deriving from discussions in the sci.electronics.*
and other electronics newsgroups.
If your default news server does not carry the alt.binaries groups
(due to the insane traffic volume), there are some free sites with
read only acess (see the newsgroup alt.free.newsservers), and there
are many commercial NSPs (news service providers) where (by changing
the configuration on your news server or browers) you can read and
post through them (with an account name and password). [Suggestions?]
Try, for line drawings, to use a compressed file format. Recommended
are monochrome .pdf files or and indexed format like GIF or PNG, or TIFF.
The smallest files seem to be the formats (mono .pdf, TIFF) that use
the Group 4 CCITT fax compression algorithm, with .png and .gif being
somewhat bigger. JPG, jpeg doesn't work well on line drawings.
Retention times on alt.binaries may be short, as set by each
news servers operation policy. If you have content that has
some long term value, try to set up a web site, or ftp directory.
Q. What's the difference between sci.electronic.components, .design,
and .equipment?
A. The split here is set up on levels of complexity. In this field
of technology, people look for solutions to problems along these
levels. Someone who is looking for a box that solves their
problems is working at a higher level of detail than someone who
is designing a module (circuit board) and that second person is
working at a higher level than someone looking for a pre-built
integrated circuit that they need to purchase.
The proposed components group is for questions dealing with
individual parts. Someone working on this level is looking for
a specific function or source or identification for an
electronic component. Postings requesting the identification of
an integrated circuit are a large portion of the current
traffic.
The design group is for persons combining components into
circuits. Discussion on design solutions and techniques.
The equipment group is for persons looking for already available
solutions to their problems. In other words, if someone is
looking for a solution to their problem, and wants to buy
something with a warranty, and that has a salesman and tech
support along with it, .equipment is the place to ask for
advice. (This is not the place to suggest that the person can
go down to Radio Shack and get a 555 and wire up a circuit.)
Q. What's left for sci.electronics.misc?
A. Gossip, history, trivia, manufacturing, systems, standards,
announcements ...
Charters and description lines.
sci.electronics.basics Elementary questions about electronics.
"A forum for discussion of electronics where there is no such
thing as a stupid question. Beginners questions. Discussion of
electronics education. Requests for other sources of information."
sci.electronics.cad Schematic drafting, printed circuit layout, simulation.
"sci.electronics.cad is an unmoderated group for the discussion
of Computer Aided Design software (and systems) for use in
designing electronic circuits and assemblies. Topics can
include Schematic "Capture" software, Printed Circuit Board
layout software, introductory and educational use of circuit
simulation software such as Spice, obtaining simulation
descriptions (Spice models) for electronic components, and any
other computer software that relates to designing electronic
circuits at the printed circuit board level."
sci.electronics.components Integrated circuits, resistors, capacitors.
"Discussions of electronics at the component level. The use,
limitations, and identification of resistors, capacitors,
integrated circuits, connectors, enclosures, ... and so on.
Locations and contact information for Manufacturers,
Distributors, and other sources for supply and technical
information."
sci.electronics.design Electronic circuit design.
"Discussions relevant to the design of electronics circuits."
sci.electronics.equipment Test, lab, & industrial electronic products.
"Discussion of the application and internal operation and
relative merits of test equipment, laboratory equipment, and
industrial equipment. This is not a forsale group.
Buying/selling is supposed to occur in the relocated
misc.industry.electronics.marketplace group. (Discussions on the
relative merits of various consumer electronics equipment are
better held in the groups in the rec hierarchy devoted to those
topics.)"
sci.electronics.misc General discussions of the field of electronics.
"General discussions on the topic of electronics. (Discussions
on the relative merits of various consumer electronics equipment
are better held in the groups in the rec hierarchy devoted to
those topics.)"
sci.electronics.repair Fixing electronic equipment.
"sci.electronics.repair is an unmoderated group for the
discussion of repairing electronic equipment. Topics to
include: Requests for assistance, Where to obtain servicing
information and parts, Techniques for diagnosis and repair, and
Anecdotes about success, failures and problems with equipment
manufacturers."
misc.industry.electronics.marketplace Electronics products & services.
"Advertisement and discussion for the buying, selling, and
bartering of electronic components (integrated circuits,
resistor, capacitors, etc.), electronics test equipment,
electronics laboratory equipment, electronics industrial
equipment, and services used for the production of electronics.
NO CONSUMER ELECTRONICS - NO AUDIO, VIDEO, or HOME COMPUTERS."
Other groups of interest
alt.binaries.schematics.electronic
alt.engineering.electrical
sci.engr.electrical.compliance
sci.engr.electrical.sys-protection
rec.video.*
rec.audio.*
misc.forsale.*
rec.radio.*
(added)