Television Repair

"ENGINEERING has been chosen as the TOUGHEST course amongst all other courses including BCom, BCA, BSc, MBBS & on: by the Guinness Book of World Records, on 18 Aug 2010. There are 58 university examinations, 130 series examinations & 174 assignments within the span of 4 years i.e maximum of 750 working days."

This was a facebook status, updated by my friend and I stumbled upon it. I'm none to debate on the authenticity of this statement. All I want to do is to disclose a funny experience of mine. After waging a great war against Kannur university for a four and a half years, to be exact, yours truly became a Btech degree holder in Electronics & Communication although I didn't know what those two words really meant!

One fine day, I was at my home and something happened to my TV set. Well, my father called in a specialist repairman. And that happened to be the lab attender working in my mother's school. He found that the trouble was with 'LOT'. I was watching over these proceedings. Suddenly my father asked, "what is LOT"? I didn't know what to answer. Suddenly he explained, "it is a flyback transformer (FBT), also called a line output transformer (LOPT) which was primarily designed to generate high current sawtooth signals at a relatively high frequency. It was invented as a means to control the horizontal movement of the electron beam in a cathode ray tube (CRT). The voltage and frequency can each range over a wide scale depending on the device. For example, a large color TV CRT may require 20 to 50 kV with a horizontal scan rate of 15.734 kHz". Hearing this my father asked, "what did you learn in Btech"? I answered, "I'm still trying to figure out".