If Radio Shack sells it, it's probably junk!

If they have anything worthwhile, they'll discontinue it. They've had really useful tools from time to time, but, if they have three such tools and one of them is pretty good, they'll stop offering it the good one and continue to carry the ones that are "not so good."

I've heard of the "magic jack" in the past, with its somewhat dodgy reputation, but now that I hear that Radio Shack offers it, I'm sure to warn others off it.

Many years ago, this policy was established. They once sold components, and, back in the late '70's, when they were still pretty "solid" as a vendor, they sold one of my clients some (about 1k) 7805 and 7812 voltage regulators which my client was happy to find, as they were in high demand. It turned out, however, that these were all, and I mean all, out-of-spec devices, either because of poor regulation or simply out-of-spec voltage. Likewise, at the same time, they bought about 1k diodes from them, only to find that all of them were defective, i.e. either open or shorted. Not one of them worked. These were clearly floor-sweepings. Having had opportunity to do so, I checked a few of their TRS-80 floppy disk enclosure power supplies, and found that the regulators in them were, in fact, also out of specs. They were, in each case, outside the 5% limit that the spec set forth. APparently they had their computer accessories built with the same sort of floor-sweepings that they sold my client.

RE