Radio Inventory

[thermionic]

Hi All. This all sounds like a grand idea, but we need to narrow the margins of inclusion. We first must stick to British manufactured valve radios made between the twenties and the fifties, for example. BVWS members could be sent a 'request for information' form with every bulletin mail-out. Members would supply information on their collection voluntarily and in the knowedge that this information will be handled appropriately by the BVWS.
Of course, the system will only be as good as the contributers dilligance in providing updates regularly. So the massive effort will not only be with the collater of this info, but to members also. Can all of us who are willing to provide details of our collections also be ready and eager to communicate deviations in our inventory? If the answer is 'yes' then we are well on the way to reaching this goal.

Well, thats my 2 penny worth!!

Cheers, Simon T ..

[stevekendal]

Well, it,s good to know that there are others out there who are similarly afflicted with the radio collecting bug. With around 200 now I was starting to become a little worried that it was/is getting out of control. Does anyone know if there is an effective treatment for the compulsion to buy far more gear than you have space for, or could ever hope to restore? Steve.

[Paul Stenning]

Are you single and living alone? I think the treatment is to get a partner who does not share your enthusiasm - although whether you'd feel it was a successful treatment is debatable!

[Station X]

Does anyone know if there is an effective treatment for the compulsion to buy far more gear than you have space for, or could ever hope to restore?

You could try moving to a small flat with no attic, cellar or garden, so you have no space to store anything.

Graham.

[quantum]

Originally Posted by G4ILN

You could try moving to a small flat with no attic, cellar or garden, so you have no space to store anything

Won't work - you'd end up hiring a local shed or garage to keep the sets in. Once you have an addiction the habit is very hard to break...

I think that having a centralised database would be of limited use in determining numbers, value, concentrations of ownership etc.. of sets. In addition to the problems of people not knowing what sets they have themselves, some will not give that information to the database anyway, as they might be frightened by the info falling into the 'wrong' hands, or being bugged by people wanting to get their hands on a particular set, or even because they might be embarrassed by admitting to the type of sets they collect!!

[jim_beacon]

Having a partner is no cure - ask my wife!

Jim, who has lost count of how many sets he has (on purpose!)

[stevekendal]

No Paul, not alone , but with a wife, 2 daughters still at home with boy friends, Stepson, 2 dogs, 3 cats , and a hamster, I need some form of escapism don,t I!

[Darren-UK]

Reading through all the comments so far, I feel that theoretically such an inventory is a nice idea but in practical terms is just too mammoth a task and one which could never be maintained with 100% accuracy.

Inclusions/exclusions have been mentioned. Maybe it would be more practical and more interesting to concentrate upon rarer things like prewar radios and televisions. I really see no point, at least at the present time, in giving time and effort to recording details of things like postwar woodies which are, frankly, still very common and uninteresting.

Following on from that view and rather turning the table on myself, would such a focussed and thus very incomplete record be worth the effort ? I'm afraid I must just 'sit on the fence' over this issue

[IanGEC]

Really I guess it comes down to getting enough people to divide the task up into small enough chunks that once the first data load is done maintaining the data becomes a less onerous job. If you had a register keeper for each british volume manufacturer it would split it up and maybe sub divided into valves and transistors then it might be ok.....

[GMB]

I have been considering whether to offer to do it, but not directly on a server but rather as an online-requested offline-updated database with only a summary published. If updates were only applied say once a week how onerous can it be? (OK - very, due to all the inevitable silly problems). I don't quite understand what aspect of this leads to suggestions of limiting the remit or breaking the task up - unless you were considering some kind of manual process being involved per item in the database?

[Kat Manton]

I've been reading this thread with interest; have been thinking a lot about it and have a few thoughts to share.

• If this was done as a web-based 'community' thing the admin task automatically breaks itself down. Any member of The Registry can do a bit or a lot; either just adding the sets in their own collection or doing more if they have the time/inclination.
• A small number of 'super-admins' would be all that's required; just to keep a look-out for abuse - their workload would be relatively small; for example, photographs of sets ought to be approved prior to them appearing on the site.
• The more useful it is, the more people will be encouraged to use it, so making it more useful, etc etc. So it needs to be useful to individual collectors; to encourage input of their collections.

Addressing the 'usefulness' point - I've thought of a few things it'd be possible to do with it once it's up and running and has been in use a while. If, say, we have a bunch of databases for members collections, specific sets (with representative photograph), and valves...

• Directly order service data from Paul's automated system.
• List pinouts of the valve line-up for any set in your collection on one (printable) page. (We don't need to store all the base diagrams, images can be dynamically generated from a valve database.)
• Get valve equivalents. (Direct equivalents, near equivalents, equivalents which would work with a pin-out or socket change.)
• Identify mystery sets by querying, say, on a manufacturer's name and a partial valve line-up.
• List all sorts of useful (and otherwise!) statistics; say; from how many Bush DAC90s exist in member's collections to how many sets made between 1945 and 1948 used a 6V6.

It all comes down to a combination of imagination and good database design initially - which is why I've kept quiet until now as I'm still working it all out And, of course, it needs a friendly interface which makes it easy and quick for a member to add his/her collection to the system whether or not the specific set and its valves exist in the respective databases. In my experience, if something like this seems like fun, not a chore, it'll get used.

It'll take a while but I'm 'between jobs' at present due to illness and so have a fair bit of time on my hands; also it's the damn good excuse I've been looking for to get my teeth well-and-truly stuck into SQL, PHP and a whole load of related things.

I'll leave it at that for now; plenty of details still to iron out and probably several weeks of work to get something up and running by way of a demonstration.

But, to get an idea of how such a web community thing can work; I'd suggest taking a look at another one I'm familiar with - Cobweb's an 'AFOL' (Adult Fan Of Lego) and makes extensive use of, and contributes to http://www.peeron.com/ - the basic 'model' looks just as applicable to wireless sets as to knobbly bits of coloured plastic

Kat

[Mike Phelan]

Originally Posted by Kat Manton

It'll take a while but I'm 'between jobs' at present due to illness and so have a fair bit of time on my hands; also it's the damn good excuse I've been looking for to get my teeth well-and-truly stuck into SQL, PHP and a whole load of related things.

Kat

JFI, I do SQL and ASP.NET for a living

[Paul Stenning]

I have offered Kat free website hosting for this.

[Kat Manton]

Originally Posted by Mike Phelan

JFI, I do SQL and ASP.NET for a living

I'll certainly bear that in mind if I need to pick your brains on something

ASP's one of those proprietary Microsoft things, isn't it, though? As this is a non-commercial endeavour I'd intend to stick with open-source solutions to keep the costs down; it's where my experience lies anyway. I've some experience with mySQL - my Intranet server's heaving under the strain of masses of information and so runs a search engine with a mySQL backend. I've also been looking into a few web content-management systems; primarily modular community-orientated SQL/PHP-based ones. This, I think, would provide most of the required functionality, with just a few additional modules needed to handle the specifics of data manipulation for valve, wireless-set and collection databases. It's all good fun and I've not hit anything particularly tricky - PHP doesn't make my head revolve as rapidly as embedded realtime audio DSP did... this is 'light relaxation'

It keeps me busy; being out of work's boring at the best of times and I don't like the thought of my skills going rusty through disuse.

Regards, Kat

[Mike Phelan]

Originally Posted by Kat Manton

I'll certainly bear that in mind if I need to pick your brains on something

If you can find 'em, you can pick 'em

ASP's one of those proprietary Microsoft things, isn't it, though?

Sort of - it can be used for either VB.ASP.NET or Javascript, or C#.
As we are an M$ solution provider, we have to toe the party line!
Not used MySQL, but SQL Server we eat and sleep!

It keeps me busy; being out of work's boring at the best of times and I don't like the thought of my skills going rusty through disuse.
Regards, Kat

Quite right, Kat!

[IanGEC]

Ok - So now the techie's have taken over it's a whole new language

I am happy to assist with admin type stuff once it is up and running but all this techie speak is beyond me - I just use computers - so if someone tells me what to do I can handle that.

[GMB]

Well volunteered Kat, an on-line database would provide the nicest solution. But do bear in mind that anything that allows immediate interactive posting will be subject to abuse if it is ever seen not to be actively policed.

On behalf of those of us who are not just interested in domestic radios, can I urge you to cover all old technology electronics (well at least of the valve kind), not just DAC90s.

[Kat Manton]

Originally Posted by GMB

Well volunteered Kat, an on-line database would provide the nicest solution. But do bear in mind that anything that allows immediate interactive posting will be subject to abuse if it is ever seen not to be actively policed.

Indeed; there'll have to be some form of accountability/traceability involved; possibly involving all transactions on the database having to be approved, possibly not... I'm at the 'scribbling lots of notes and reading stuff' stage, really.

Originally Posted by GMB

On behalf of those of us who are not just interested in domestic radios, can I urge you to cover all old technology electronics (well at least of the valve kind), not just DAC90s.

Definitely - My own interests are quite broad; domestic radios, tape recorders, television sets, test equipment, military communications gear, amateur radio gear... Restricting it initially to 'domestic radio' and perhaps even 'British only' in the first instance enables bugs and misfeatures to be ironed out before things take off; but ultimately I'd like it to be as non-restrictive as possible. Once something is up and running it should be easy (I'll make sure it is!) enough to add support for other categories of equipment. Personally, I like fifties woodies and sixties/seventies trannies as much as anything else - I'm not wealthy enough to collect pre-war sets, the more collectible bakelite sets or forties television sets - though I'm working on it

[Photo_Tube]

If this database going to be open source it could be a community effort, so there should be something where you can dump your source code/build. Maybe have a play around with Perl

[Paul Stenning]

Originally Posted by Kat Manton

Indeed; there'll have to be some form of accountability/traceability involved; possibly involving all transactions on the database having to be approved, possibly not... I'm at the 'scribbling lots of notes and reading stuff' stage, really.

Maybe a login system like the forum would cover that adequately. Obviously we'll get the odd idiot who thinks it's fun to post an inappropriate image, but they tend to lose interest once the postings get deleted and the login banned a couple of times.