When you live and breathe electronics, it’s always a thrill to receive a new catalogue from one of your favourite electronics stores. This month, we get to review the latest catalogue from Wagner Electronics, and it’s a beauty. Their latest 2020 catalogue is over 1300 pages of electronics goodness!

If you haven’t heard of Wagner before, they are an Australian based retailer serving the electronics industry, from hobbyists to electronics engineers, audio, visual and data systems integrators and installers. They have been around for over 25 years and stock many thousands of product lines in their Sydney warehouse. Shoppers can visit their retail shopfront on Parramatta Road in Summer Hill, Sydney, or place orders by phone, fax (yes, it’s still a thing), email or online.

Thanks to the digital age, there’s no need to thumb through a phone book sized book to find what you need. Instead, the Wagner catalogue is available as an eBook so you can easily flip through all 1360 pages onscreen. Alternatively, downloadable PDFs are also available, which are split into different product categories to reduce file size.

Both the eBook and PDF methods allow you to search easily and print any pages you want as a hardcopy. The eBook is easy to navigate, thanks to clickable links in the indexes, and we were pleased to see that some products had clickable links to download technical datasheets, wiring guides, etc., without having to leave the catalogue.

What we didn’t find in the catalogue, however, was prices. We assume the unpredictable nature of the Aussie dollar recently would make it hard to set prices for the long term. The upside is that you’ll always get the latest price on the Wagner website.

From a maker’s perspective, there’s plenty to like about Wagner’s catalogue. As you browse through the many pages, you really get a sense of the incredible range Wagner has for all sorts of applications and special requirements. Take, for example, the humble tactile switch. Here’s a screenshot of just one page from the catalogue showing different tactile types, from SMD to throughhole with a ground pin, and right-angle variants. You may also notice they also include technical drawings.

Keep your wiring neat, protected and colour coded with this handy 163-piece heatshrink kit with diameters from 1mm to 16mm.

Code: HSK163
Page: 02-58
RRP: $26

Every maker’s workbench should have a decent soldering station, and there’s plenty to choose from at Wagner. The HAKKO brand is well regarded and there are many models to suit different soldering needs. The FX888D 65W iron, for example, is compact, ESD-safe, has five temperature presets and fast thermal recovery.

Code: FX888D
Page: 07-46
RRP: $189

A few other maker related products from the thousands that are available:

If you know your NAND gates from your NOR gates you’ll need this logic probe for your digital testing and fault finding. It has single-shot and short pulse detection and hold.

Code: LP2800
Page: 07-82
RRP: $49.95

One of our favourites. Addressable RGB strips to light up your world in amazing colour. They are supplied on 5m rolls that you can cut to any length, and available in IP20 (open), IP65 sealed, or IP68 GEL for use in wet areas indoors or outdoors. An RF controller is available separately, but we imagine our savvy maker reader would hook them up to a microcontroller.

Code: DIGILED-1101/11/21
Page: 08-152
RRP: From $56.50

If you enjoy listening to music with silky highs, punchy mids, and creamy overdrive, there’s plenty of valve audio tubes available. Some with “modern and aggressive character” and another with “old-school tone”.

► Pages: 10-41 to 10-43

Need a circuit board but don’t have the time to etch one yourself? Wagner has a great selection of prototyping boards, from stripboards and matrix types of all sizes, to specialty types with breadboard patterns. We particularly like the DIP type component breakout that can support a DIP IC with up to 20 pins.

Page: 10-40
Code: PCB114
RRP: $2.20

Instead of winding your own coils, which can be rather tricky, Wagner has a large range of air core inductors from 0.03mH up to 10mH.

Page: 10-73