My name is Steve Rawlings, holder of the amateur radio callsign 'GW4ALG'.  

Through these pages, you can find out how to draw your own circuit diagrams using The Microsoft 'Paint' application. 

This may not be the most professional way of drawing circuit diagrams, but it does use readily available software, and, with practice, you can produce good looking drawings that are easy to maintain.

To start producing your first circuit diagram, copy the template files onto your C: drive.

Start MS Paint and open the required template file.  Then start another session of MS Paint and save your new file as a monochrome .bmp file.  Now you're ready to start pasting the required symbols into your new file.

Then it's just a matter of using the features in Paint to place the symbols in the right place, and connect them together with lines of suitable thickness.

Here's one I made earlier:

Good luck with your poor man's CAD package!

UPDATE

Since writing the original article in 2002, I find that the latest versions of Paint intended for Windows 10 and Windows 11 don't render BMP images very well.  The image gets distorted in all editing screens (normal size, and zoomed-in sizes).  The only time that accurate WYSIWYG images are presented to the screen is when viewing the image in 'Full Screen' (non-editing) mode.

But the old version of Paint that came with Windows XP still works perfectly under Windows 11.   My thanks to Tony G4WIF for suggesting that I seek out an XP version of Paint and try running it under Windows 11. 

I downloaded the XP version of Paint from:
https://archive.org/details/MSPaintWinXP

Steve Rawlings, ex-GW4ALG
21 February 2023