3478A quote from Lambda Calibrations for the calibration and return carriage of the meter, all up including VAT for the princely sum of £208.92, thats nearly 6 times what I paid for the meter, that makes RS look like a real bargain.
What the fuck were they thinking?!?!? That's a "go away" quote!
..................
Anyway more TEA from me (finally).
Nabbed a Leader 17A signal generator for £31 off ebay as untested. These things literally have nothing in them to go wrong. If they aren't smashed they will probably work. This is a very much cloned instrument by the Chinese. Lots of inferior clones exist out there, including historically from crap shifters Maplin. But alas this is the original made in Japan unit which has superior capacitors and surprisingly high tech innards!
I like these because of the manual control (try manually filter sweeping a synthesizer or finding the resonant point of a double tuned circuit - kill me!) and the price.
I cracked it open, as per regulations, to look inside before I even fired it up. The power supply is a nice simple design and quite elegant. Greeted with a panasonic capacitor as well no less. No wun hung lo here.
Moving along a bit we have the main tuning capacitor and reduction drive assembly. Nice and tight. Ridiculously high quality capacitor in this one.
And now for the anachronistic thing. This is basically a giant LC oscillator design which has been around since the 1940s with various tubes, transistors and ICs connected to it. But what is this? Surface mount parts! A fully discrete oscillator and ALC section hides in here. The earlier units didn't have ALC.
And on to the glorious bit. This is pretty much unchanged from the 1940s:
And in action, shouting at a Baofeng:
https://youtu.be/hfrA_lH7iEQDial calibration is about right ... 1/2% off on the higher ranges which is pretty normal for these.