in the book, the amusement factor can come in.

Back to the TUN & TUP age

The schematics in the book eerily resemble the renowned Elektor house style that has been in existence since the early 1970 and rules to this day. The same for the choice of the most elementary components:  as in Elektor magazine, the authors’ all-time favourite tranny is the BC547 for npn and the BC557 for pnp. Yes the TUN and TUP respectively. Still, a little research on my part proved that neither Elektor’s drawing department or lab was involved in the production, so I reckon the Shustovs spent some hours reading back copies of Elektor Magazine as well as many of the 3xx Circuits books with their compilations of 300+ Summer Circuits each, where x = 0 through 12.

The mentally most stimulating section of the book is towards the end when electronics gets linked to, ermm, esoteric effects, unusual phenomena, paradoxical experiments and other oddities of nature including humans. Like Kirlian photography, thunderstorm prediction, certain types of (extremely doubtful) electrotherapy, (alleged) superconductivity, underground rumblings,  aerion detection (anyone??), hypnosis, and “psycho emotional correction”.  All these subjects and more were also popular in Elektor magazine and other publications in the “smoky” mid-1970s.

There are no vacuum tube circuits in the book, which I find surprising as Russian engineers have contributed enormously to both the development and the glorious return of this technology — just think where all the “NOS” valves (tubes) seen on Ebay come from. And nixies, VFDs, tunnel diodes, 6502’s, GaAs FETs….

Nostalgic stirs
Browsing this book is like walking on a scrapyard and seeing piles of electronic parts and pieces you grew up with but abandoned “as part of my career and managerial skills development” or simply left to gather dust in a plastic drawer. With this book, you can relive oddball devices like the lambda diode, tunnel diode, Ga-As FET, transistor tetrode, gyrator, negatron, and avalanche transistor. And in case they got lost in the mists of time there’s an equivalent-ish circuit to mimic their operation.

The authors despite their limited command of English and the more popular words for parts and technologies have succeed in bringing these TUN/TUP style parts to life again by combining them in circuits they claim to have tested personally for correct, or in any case expected operation. I cannot confirm this claim, only that the book is thoroughly inspiring and the perfect call to all electronics engineers: either prove me wrong or show me you can do it better with fewer and cheaper components. To your bookcases gentlemen, and then to the irons!

Electronic Circuits For All
M.A. Shustov  & A.M. Shustov
Elektor International Media
ISBN 978-1-907920-65-3
406 pages, soft bound
www.elektor.com/electronic-circuits-for-all

Reviewers note
Just before handing in this review I was notified by Elektor’s book production department that an initial production run had printing errors on pages 171 through 179. This is now subject to correction at the printers and the book will appear shortly.