What interested me in electronics when I joined the Navy was, I was technically oriented and I already knew that I either wanted to be an electronics technician or a computer programmer. I had taken classes in computer programming in college. When I talked to my recruiter, he offered me either electronics technician, data systems operator, data processor or radioman.

One of the classes we teach is operations and the other class that we teach is maintenance. The operations class may have mine men going through it and electronics technicians. The maintenance class will have the electronics technicians only.

Troubleshooting is part of the technician's job.

Troubleshooting is fault isolation using logical, known troubleshooting techniques, what we call in the Navy seven-step troubleshooting. The nature of troubleshooting is going to be first locating the faulty unit and from there, locating the faulty assembly, the faulty circuit card, and the faulty component.

The key to troubleshooting is following a logical sequence making measurements with test equipment using a technical manual that has known parameters in it and isolating the fault.

The skills required to be an electronics technician in the Navy are knowing the electronics, having a lot of common sense, and being persistent.

Occasionally, you don't have just the easy troubleshooting problem that is required to be solved. Occasionally, it requires troubleshooting in excess of 12 hours straight. In other words, when there's a difficult problem that needs to be solved, you keep on going until it's up.

When I was on the U.S.S. Beaufort, a smaller ship, we didn't have redundant equipment and the ANWSC-3 satellite communications transceiver broke. The ship lost all of its communications. I was off the coast of Japan.

Everybody from the commanding officer down to the operations officer would come by and ask me how I was doing as I troubleshot. Once I identified the fault, when we pulled into the next port, we received the part and replaced it and fixed it. When we pulled out of port, it was back in a working condition. It took me approximately 12 hours [to find the problem].