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I had a major grumpy old man moment yesterday. Since electrical stuff is something I'm interested in, I feel that it's incumbent upon me to install after-market devices in my beetle as a way of customizing it. I'd like to have a mount for a GPS that's powered from the car, and since it currently doesn't have a working radio at all, before I take it on any major trips, I'd like to install a Sirius radio in it.
By the way, reason I went with Sirius over XM is that Sirius carries NFL football games, so that means that I can't listen to Indy Car racing...oh well. The radio display that they have for games is neat:
Instead of title and artist, the lower two lines of the display list the teams playing and the current score. That way you can flip to another channel and get the score of another game quickly. A clever way to make the experience more efficient.
Before I start hanging extra devices on the electrical bus of the beetle, which isn't that robust anyway, I want to have instrumentation on the electrical system. I want to have meters to measure the voltage of the system and the current flowing to (or from) the battery and the total electrical draw. I went to Radio Shack thinking that they would have something. Well, it turns out they don't. Not a single blessed panel current meter in the store, and the clerk's method for searching for it was to log onto the Radio Shack web site and search for it there. I could have done that from home, thanks.
And that was my Grumpy Old Man moment. As recently as 1995, Radio Shack was an electronics gadget store; that is, if you wanted to build something out of wires and components, that was where you went to get the parts. I guess that they as a franchise are following the path that they need to to survive, but it saddens me that what was once a paragon of useful stuff is now primarily a reseller of digital TV items, cell phones, and crappy remote control toys and stereo equipment. Granted, they do have some amounts of component-level merchandise, but that's like 20% of the store or less.