I'd like to call attention to the EEVblog.com forum.
I was put off by Dave's YouTube persona and didn't pay attention to it for a long time. Yes, there is no shortage of Bozos, but it is the damndest collection of PhDs, both papered and common-law I've ever come across on line.
Obviously, anyone with a user name including "Dr" or Wizard" is almost certainly full of BS. But I have verified a number of times by PM that the person did indeed have a PhD, though generally not in EE.
Probably my favorite example was a post entitled, "Has Anyone Built a Mass Spectrometer". The OP is working on a quadrapole mass spec. About the 4th post in was someone who had built two. The first an academic instrument. The second a commercial instrument with a $750K budget.
But there are many more people playing around at that level. So it's a lot of fun. At least if you like hanging out with people who know more than you do. And helping others trying to get there.
There's an amazing thread on building a picoradian tiltmeter using a $12 Chinese vial and a capacitance sensor. Though a slightly more expensive British vial gives better performance because the interior finish on the $12 vials is not very good. These are instruments which placed on a concrete slab have a strong response to walking near it. And register clearly that a car pulled in or out of the driveway from inside the garage.
