Author Topic: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread  (Read 14564124 times)

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Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18350 on: October 18, 2018, 03:16:08 pm »
9 pages....!

You get busy for a couple of days and then there's 9 pages on which to catch up.


This did raise a smile, though:
Nice rack there! :-+
For the simple reason that, in this thread, it is just a genuine admiration of the electronics shown and would garner a thumbs up from anyone, without offence.  In other environments, a very different reaction might occur.

Y'know it never even entered my mind (which has on occasion been liked to a cesspit) to apply any alternative, possibly salacious, interpretation to that remark.

just shows what a thoroughly nice bunch we all are here, well rounded and tolerant folk and lingering here is a real tonic as we learn what makes each other tick and share the good humour just as much as we do the electronics, stuffed shirts are what some forums attract but not so here, this is like a dress down day everyday and long may it continue :-+
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Online mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18351 on: October 18, 2018, 03:16:58 pm »
Trump does it again. No more cheap stuff from China for you Americans https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45894346

So Pomona?  :-DD
Highly likely now I think. Mind you, after Brexit we won't be getting anything from China because planes, ships etc would not be able to operate if what the anti Brexiters are saying is true.....

I doubt it. Much more likely he's just trying to  drive the last nail in the USPS coffin. All those mazillions of fly-sized packets are the only thing keeping the USPS afloat thanks to decades of "government oversight" attempting to privatize what has historically been a public service.

Of course, when China gets pissed off enough, they'll rattle the trillions of dollars of US debt they still hold, and he'll either shut the fuck up and backpedal like the little baby he is, or start an actual shooting war to shift blame. That mostly will depend on who's been stroking his... ahem... "ego" lately at the time everything comes to a head.   :palm:

Here's the nitty-gritty: He just gave away trillions to his cronies who were able to shift their profits offshore, & billions/year thereafter with his tax scam; but $300m is worth destroying the USPS over? No; destroying the USPS is the GOAL, not the collateral damage.  :palm: :palm: :palm:

Yep which is one reason I’ve got 39 aliexpress orders outstanding now  :-DD
If what we now know had come out last time, I seriously doubt that Brexit would be happening, I think we now need a second vote, not even the remain camp fully knew just how much we are reliant on the EU for life as we know now it, next year does not look pretty, all flights outside UK, stopped, same with shipping, not eurotunnel, ferries etc etc, no more holidays abroad, relatives living overseas would become distant memories and lost to us forever once we undo that knot  :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared:

Not to stick my dick in the hornet's nest, but how is it we on the other side of the pond knew how stupid it was, and how much the UK economy was intertwined in, and dependent upon critical services provided by the EU, and you guys didn't?

I mean, we don't have any excuses; we just let a noisy 10% put a spoiled little brat-baby in the White House, and then did NOTHING about it... but fuck man, you guys are supposed to be the "classically educated & worldly" ones while we're just the dumb kids of religious cult colonists & castoff criminals.   :o

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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18352 on: October 18, 2018, 03:44:31 pm »
Not to stick my dick in the hornet's nest, but how is it we on the other side of the pond knew how stupid it was, and how much the UK economy was intertwined in, and dependent upon critical services provided by the EU, and you guys didn't?

You didn't see the media here. What happened was there are a bunch of tax evasion laws (ATAD 2019) being introduced by the EU which would affect the political and media elite as it destroys their tax havens instantly thus taking a small chunk of their mountainous hoardings away. How better to solve this than a total media bombardment of echo room sympathetic ideals to flip the borderline and total racist tosswads and dumbass imbred shit scum on side of voting against membership of the union introducing the legislation. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Scott D Weitsenhoffer, "Debating dumbasses on the topic of politics is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.



Anyway radio pr0n. Small things you can hide from SWMBO?  filters! Ho ho ho! Well I thought so. It turned up a giant classy looking shiny metallic jiffy bag thus attracting way more attention than "random bag from China" or random tape covered box :palm:

Behold, one crystal filter, actually made by Collins no less. Had no idea they sold these. Thought it was all killing and exploding stuff.

 

Offline med6753

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18353 on: October 18, 2018, 03:52:06 pm »
9 pages....!

You get busy for a couple of days and then there's 9 pages on which to catch up.


This did raise a smile, though:
Nice rack there! :-+
For the simple reason that, in this thread, it is just a genuine admiration of the electronics shown and would garner a thumbs up from anyone, without offence.  In other environments, a very different reaction might occur.

Y'know it never even entered my mind (which has on occasion been liked to a cesspit) to apply any alternative, possibly salacious, interpretation to that remark.

Oh it entered my mind.  >:D I'm always on the look out for a "nice rack" be it TEA related.....or not.  :-DD :-DD

Welcome to my salacious cesspit

Edit, nice rack image added  ;D
« Last Edit: October 18, 2018, 03:59:56 pm by med6753 »
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Online mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18354 on: October 18, 2018, 04:12:35 pm »
If he can spend $1M to build the effing thing, pretty sure he can afford to grease the wheels to get any kind of permitting he needs.

mnem
I live in America. We invented 8000HP AA Nitro Funny cars because we were bored; nothing surprises me anymore.
I know he can and has done so over your side of the pond. I really doubt on this side of the pond that it would get a permit to fly or get any insurance. Since we had a standard Hunter jet crash at Shoreham a couple of years back, CAA have gone into hypo drive and loads of extra red tape has been put in place, new rules, regulations, in place and bans etc.

So if planes that have been flying successfully for years with a set of well known characteristics, flown by ex military pilots who are used to flying them can be prevented from flying, then a plane that is totally unique, unknown characteristics most likely would be grounded too. Even the owner admits its a handful and he's still learning about it.

Yeah, they do hide a multitude of sins under the "experimental aircraft" umbrella over here. At least I assume that's how he got it certified airworthy. I have a hard time believing he was able to reinforce the firewall structure (sorry, I don't know the correct term here for real aircraft) enough to REALLY be safe handling 4x the HP it was designed for. This isn't some RC foamy F3A Pattern Flyer; this is a real airplane he's making fly in low-z like that. The structural stresses must be phenomenal.   :palm:

Air-mechanicking is a big industry here in Houston; I know two people from two totally different aspects who've both been forced to quit their jobs because they refused to sign off on work they knew wasn't safe to put in the air. One an airframe mechanic, and one a prop re-builder. Interestingly, both quit over welding repair that was clearly prohibited by regulation.

As for not being able to get it certified over there... I really do hope you're right. At least that would be evidence of SOME common sense over there, BREXIT notwithstanding.  :-DD

That Draco looks about as useful as tits on a Boar hog for a working plane.  small interior, large operating cost and low relative payload.  But it sure would be a blast to fly!
Naaahhh... not a working plane. Equivalent of a big-cc off-road motorcycle. High power-to-weight for stunt-like maneuverability, meant to get a person or two and a backpack in & out of difficult terrain. Also, a rich person's playtoy. ;) People who ride dirt bikes "for the riding" rarely go over 250cc unless they're fatasses like me.

9 pages....!

You get busy for a couple of days and then there's 9 pages on which to catch up.


This did raise a smile, though:
Nice rack there! :-+
For the simple reason that, in this thread, it is just a genuine admiration of the electronics shown and would garner a thumbs up from anyone, without offence.  In other environments, a very different reaction might occur.
Y'know, it never even entered my mind (which has on occasion been liked to a cesspit) to apply any alternative, possibly salacious, interpretation to that remark.

   For some reason, I find that VERY difficult to believe. ;)

Dumbasses be dumbasses. Fact of life.

If you can't fight 'em, manipulate 'em and exploit 'em. Which is what is happening everywhere in every way.

Yeah, and in a few years they'll come back and sue / write some idiotic law / create some barbaric new Government Agency that DOES exactly what it's supposed to protect us all from, just because we who knew better didn't protect us from their own stupidity.

And the best part? They expect us to protect them from their own stupidity, AND fight them for the privilege of doing so.  :palm: :palm: :palm:

Not to stick my dick in the hornet's nest, but how is it we on the other side of the pond knew how stupid it was, and how much the UK economy was intertwined in, and dependent upon critical services provided by the EU, and you guys didn't?

You didn't see the media here. What happened was there are a bunch of tax evasion laws (ATAD 2019) being introduced by the EU which would affect the political and media elite as it destroys their tax havens instantly thus taking a small chunk of their mountainous hoardings away. How better to solve this than a total media bombardment of echo room sympathetic ideals to flip the borderline and total racist tosswads and dumbass imbred shit scum on side of voting against membership of the union introducing the legislation. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Scott D Weitsenhoffer, "Debating dumbasses on the topic of politics is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.

Okay... so essentially the same game as over here, putting the idiot-child in place so they could pass the most globally-despised tax bill since before Black Thursday. I knew the game wasn't just over here... it had to be a global affair.

"Never argue with an idiot. First they drag you down to their level, then beat you up with experience."

Quote from: bd139
   Anyway radio pr0n. Small things you can hide from SWMBO?  filters! Ho ho ho! Well I thought so.
It turned up a giant classy looking shiny metallic jiffy bag thus attracting way more attention than "random bag from China" or random tape covered box :palm:

Behold, one crystal filter, actually made by Collins no less. Had no idea they sold these. Thought it was all killing and exploding stuff.
Forgive my ignorance... what's it do for you with this receiver? I looked up some data; it appears to be an LC filter with a movable inductor connected to a servo motor... so it improves signal rejection of anything outside a movable narrow-band pass filter? I'd have thought they had a solid-state equivalent that worked better by now.

I had a AS Base-loaded multiband antenna that tuned that way back in the day... It was a PITA when it was cold or damp, but when it was warm & dry the thing was amazing.

mnem
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« Last Edit: October 18, 2018, 04:17:36 pm by mnementh »
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Online mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18355 on: October 18, 2018, 04:27:53 pm »
9 pages....!  You get busy for a couple of days and then there's 9 pages on which to catch up.

This did raise a smile, though:
Nice rack there! :-+
For the simple reason that, in this thread, it is just a genuine admiration of the electronics shown and would garner a thumbs up from anyone, without offense.  In other environments, a very different reaction might occur.
Y'know it never even entered my mind (which has on occasion been liked to a cesspit) to apply any alternative, possibly salacious, interpretation to that remark.
Oh it entered my mind.  >:D I'm always on the look out for a "nice rack" be it TEA related.....or not.  :-DD :-DD

Welcome to my salacious cesspit Edit, nice rack image added  ;D
   *Pulls out a lawn chair in the gutter for med next to himself and Cerebus*

"There's some leftover breakfast tacos in the warmer over there, and pitchers of Mohitos & Pina Coladas in the fridge. Make yourself comfortable."


mnem
*Mind permanently in the gutter, and happily so*
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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18356 on: October 18, 2018, 05:05:06 pm »
Forgive my ignorance... what's it do for you with this receiver? I looked up some data; it appears to be an LC filter with a movable inductor connected to a servo motor... so it improves signal rejection of anything outside a movable narrow-band pass filter? I'd have thought they had a solid-state equivalent that worked better by now.

Narrows the passband of the IF considerably. Allows you to pick CW signals out of all the muck. In the evenings on 40m there's a huge bunch of activity. Literally wherever you tune you can hear 3-4 CW signals at once because the default passband is 2.7KHz. This is a 500Hz filter so allows you to pick one signal out of that thus helping the grey matter handle it.

It's nothing fancy inside. Basically machine selected 455KHz high Q ceramic resonators and some capacitors. The main thing where the cost comes in is that the tolerance is tight as a duck's arse as there's about 5-6 resonators inside that all within 5-10Hz of each other or 0.002% on a batch of 6. Plus they have to be temperature stable over 0-40oC approx.

There are two equivalents here which unfortunately neither win for me. There's the opamps, where you can synthesize a pretty good bandpass filter easy enough. But this has two problems: poor noise figure (hissing like an angry python) and requires quite a few mA (think 30-50mA for enough to get the same skirt and noise figure). Then there's the DSP. The FT-450D had a DSP in it and it had variable bandwidth filter that could pick up anything. This was at the cost of a 1.1A standing current doing bugger all with the volume turned down and sounding like someone was farting in a trash can. Gah.

So mechanical filter: tight bandpass, good noise figure, zero current consumption, sounds good  :-+

I had a AS Base-loaded multiband antenna that tuned that way back in the day... It was a PITA when it was cold or damp, but when it was warm & dry the thing was amazing.

I had one of them on my Land Rover with a Midland CB (and an illegal amp which gave you a zap if you touched any of the metal bits when TX  :-DD). I killed the antenna by forgetting to shove it down going into a car park  :palm: ... CB was fun. Miss it terribly. Nothing here now. Not even truck drivers to wind up.
 

Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18357 on: October 18, 2018, 05:25:07 pm »
Not to stick my dick in the hornet's nest, but how is it we on the other side of the pond knew how stupid it was, and how much the UK economy was intertwined in, and dependent upon critical services provided by the EU, and you guys didn't?

You didn't see the media here. What happened was there are a bunch of tax evasion laws (ATAD 2019) being introduced by the EU which would affect the political and media elite as it destroys their tax havens instantly thus taking a small chunk of their mountainous hoardings away. How better to solve this than a total media bombardment of echo room sympathetic ideals to flip the borderline and total racist tosswads and dumbass imbred shit scum on side of voting against membership of the union introducing the legislation. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Scott D Weitsenhoffer, "Debating dumbasses on the topic of politics is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.

Okay... so essentially the same game as over here, putting the idiot-child in place so they could pass the most globally-despised tax bill since before Black Thursday. I knew the game wasn't just over here... it had to be a global affair.

"Never argue with an idiot. First they drag you down to their level, then beat you up with experience."

mnem
*Back to my cave*

Who's ever heard of a politician that is one of us normal folk who wasn't born with a silver (or in some cases, gold), spoon in their mouth and entered into politics because they thought that they could represent the common man in the street (maybe Obama, but I could be wrong) and not have a hidden agenda? AFAIK most enter politics to look after their own wealth and assist their friends gain riches, while the average person has been systematically lied to and pillaged beyond belief to keep us where they want us to be, under their thumbs and believing everything that they feed us with via the media in order to get us to use our vote to get them into power and its based upon utter lies.

Just as you say that you could see how much our economy was intertwined with Europe and could not believe that we would vote for Brexit, we could all see just how much of a chump your presidential candidate was long before you lot voted him into office, it's all just smoke and mirrors and we, the average people are nothing but pawns in the grand scheme of things.
Who let Murphy in?

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Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18358 on: October 18, 2018, 05:35:24 pm »
I had a AS Base-loaded multiband antenna that tuned that way back in the day... It was a PITA when it was cold or damp, but when it was warm & dry the thing was amazing.

I had one of them on my Land Rover with a Midland CB (and an illegal amp which gave you a zap if you touched any of the metal bits when TX  :-DD). I killed the antenna by forgetting to shove it down going into a car park  :palm: ... CB was fun. Miss it terribly. Nothing here now. Not even truck drivers to wind up.
Yep, CB was great and there's literally 100's of CB sets for sale 2nd hand on Ebay and Shpock. Was yours AM or the legal FM but with a thumping great amp attached to push its TX power way above the stupid 4W limit imposed  :palm:
Who let Murphy in?

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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18359 on: October 18, 2018, 06:15:59 pm »
FM with a 50W Italian burner on it :D

Completely deregulated now. Surprised more people don’t use it. My 818 will receive it. Haven’t tried transmit.
 

Offline GreyWoolfe

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18360 on: October 18, 2018, 09:41:57 pm »
FM with a 50W Italian burner on it :D

Completely deregulated now. Surprised more people don’t use it. My 818 will receive it. Haven’t tried transmit.

Unlike the idiots here that use an illegal 200W crappy export radio to drive a barely less crappy amp to drive another semi crappy monster amp to go to shootouts to try and kill each other and their equipment.  Apparently the RF hasn't sterilized them yet as they keep making more like them.  I was like you, 50 burner in the car and a gain antenna at home.  Radio was properly aligned and had a power mike attached.  When people would tell me to turn off the amp, I would turn the mike down to zero. :-DD
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Offline med6753

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18361 on: October 18, 2018, 09:47:49 pm »
FM with a 50W Italian burner on it :D

Completely deregulated now. Surprised more people don’t use it. My 818 will receive it. Haven’t tried transmit.


FM? Really? All we had here was AM or SSB.
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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18362 on: October 18, 2018, 10:16:48 pm »
Sorry AM. Long time ago now. Brain melted :)

Was a Midland 77 104.

Edit: actually might have been FM. Genuinely can’t remember. I still have it somewhere. Will dig it out at some point and play with it.

Edit 2: Don’t have the burner. I sold that when I was with girlfriend of that era. She was expensive to run  :-DD
« Last Edit: October 18, 2018, 10:21:52 pm by bd139 »
 

Online mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18363 on: October 18, 2018, 11:26:37 pm »
Forgive my ignorance... what's it do for you with this receiver? I looked up some data; it appears to be an LC filter with a movable inductor connected to a servo motor... so it improves signal rejection of anything outside a movable narrow-band pass filter? I'd have thought they had a solid-state equivalent that worked better by now.

Narrows the passband of the IF considerably. Allows you to pick CW signals out of all the muck. In the evenings on 40m there's a huge bunch of activity. Literally wherever you tune you can hear 3-4 CW signals at once because the default passband is 2.7KHz. This is a 500Hz filter so allows you to pick one signal out of that thus helping the grey matter handle it.

It's nothing fancy inside. Basically machine selected 455KHz high Q ceramic resonators and some capacitors. The main thing where the cost comes in is that the tolerance is tight as a duck's arse as there's about 5-6 resonators inside that all within 5-10Hz of each other or 0.002% on a batch of 6. Plus they have to be temperature stable over 0-40oC approx.

There are two equivalents here which unfortunately neither win for me. There's the opamps, where you can synthesize a pretty good bandpass filter easy enough. But this has two problems: poor noise figure (hissing like an angry python) and requires quite a few mA (think 30-50mA for enough to get the same skirt and noise figure). Then there's the DSP. The FT-450D had a DSP in it and it had variable bandwidth filter that could pick up anything. This was at the cost of a 1.1A standing current doing bugger all with the volume turned down and sounding like someone was farting in a trash can. Gah.

So mechanical filter: tight bandpass, good noise figure, zero current consumption, sounds good  :-+

Okay... so you get it close as you can with the radio, and this lets you crawl up & down inside its 2.7KHz passband to separate one carrier from another?

I had a AS Base-loaded multiband antenna that tuned that way back in the day... It was a PITA when it was cold or damp, but when it was warm & dry the thing was amazing.
I had one of them on my Land Rover with a Midland CB (and an illegal amp which gave you a zap if you touched any of the metal bits when TX  :-DD). I killed the antenna by forgetting to shove it down going into a car park  :palm: ... CB was fun. Miss it terribly. Nothing here now. Not even truck drivers to wind up.
Yep, CB was great and there's literally 100's of CB sets for sale 2nd hand on Ebay and Shpock. Was yours AM or the legal FM but with a thumping great amp attached to push its TX power way above the stupid 4W limit imposed  :palm:

LOL... I have a box of Cobra 29LTDs and Presidents around here somewhere I'm going to have to triage when it turns up... think there's probably some old TRS scanners and a marine XCVR in there too, IIRC.

Keeping it TEA...

Due to the "global swarming assache syndrome" that inevitably occurs whenever Resident Chump opens his lie-hole about anything, I decided to pull the trigger on that AliEx test cable order I was talking about earlier. I figured I can use them on any meter I have, whether I get the 3478A working right or not, and it was only $35.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/50pcs-5color-Gold-Plated-Retractable-4mm-Stackable-Plug-Soldering-Type/1781741357.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/TL320-12pcs-lot-R-B-1-0meter-High-Quality-13AWG-flexible-silicone-test-leads-4mm-straight/32681958679.html

So then, feeling clever, I decided to hop on over to Bang-me-good and get a couple meters of green silicone cable to go with those green cable ends... and it all turned to shi*.

I BARELY managed to get out of there for $83, and that included burning $10 worth of affiliate points.  :palm:

Highlights include 2 kinds of shrouded 4mm jacks in case I decide to retrofit the 3478A:
https://www.banggood.com/Amass-4mm-24A-1000V-Banana-Plug-Connector-for-PCB-Board-p-1343899.html
https://www.banggood.com/2Pcs-4mm-Nickel-Plated-Binding-Post-Banana-Jack-Socket-Plug-p-953213.html

Some good old-fashioned 4mm solder & screw banana plugs in case I don't:
https://www.banggood.com/P3001-10Pcs-4mm-Multimeter-Test-Probes-Connector-Banana-Plug-Jack-p-1108651.html

Some heat-shrink tubing kits that were just too cheap & convenient to pass up:
https://www.banggood.com/DANIU-Heat-Shrink-Shrinking-Tubing-Tube-Wire-Wrap-Cable-Sleeve-Kit-Set-p-1162246.html
https://www.banggood.com/Soloop-328pcs-21-Polyolefin-Halogen-Free-Heat-Shrink-Tube-Sleeving-5-Color-8-Size-p-969574.html

iPX connectors just because:
https://www.banggood.com/10-PCS-U_FL-IPEX-IPX-Antenna-Mounting-Pedestal-Plate-SMT-Solder-Paster-20279-001E-01-p-1221544.html

A couple BNC-4mm adapters because they were too cheap:
https://www.banggood.com/Hantek-HT311-BNC-to-4-mm-Adapter-for-Automotive-Diagnostic-Oscilloscope-Portable-Accessory-p-1334226.html

and some 2mm pitch leadscrew for a mod I wanna do on my 3D Printer:
https://www.banggood.com/8mm-300400500600mm-Lead-2mm-Stainless-Steel-Leadscrew-T8-Nut-For-CNC-3D-Printer-Reprap-p-1143904.html

plus several handfuls of assorted XT60 connectors & boring RC odds/ends.

FM with a 50W Italian burner on it :D

Completely deregulated now. Surprised more people don’t use it. My 818 will receive it. Haven’t tried transmit.

Unlike the idiots here that use an illegal 200W crappy export radio to drive a barely less crappy amp to drive another semi crappy monster amp to go to shootouts to try and kill each other and their equipment.  Apparently the RF hasn't sterilized them yet as they keep making more like them.  I was like you, 50 burner in the car and a gain antenna at home.  Radio was properly aligned and had a power mike attached.  When people would tell me to turn off the amp, I would turn the mike down to zero. :-DD

Some years after I got out of Children's Band, the fellow I lived next door to got himself a rig and a linear (hacked 10m linears were everywhere at the time, even the corner store) ran some RG-59/U (too cheap to spring for RG-8, or too dumb to make his own cables) out to a car antenna vise-gripped to the wooden fence between our properties. Every freaking idiot word he ratchet-jawed until 2AM would come out over the stereo in the bedroom. First night my wife woke me up so I turned off the stereo and it seemed to go away. The next night, it started again, and kept cranking out even though the stereo was off and unplugged, and it made the touch-light in the corner go batshit crazy.

I knew then that it had to be literally feet away from our bedroom, so I went outside with a flashlight and there it was. I unclipped it, (thought about cutting the cable, but I knew the guy and had a beer with him every once in a while) unscrewed the cable and let it drop.

A few seconds later I hear "What the fuck?!?" and a minute or two of other choice expletives, then the screen door slam and him rustling around the grass. I walk around to the end of the fence and wait for him to come around, repeatedly smacking the  Vise-grips and antenna mast against the palm of my hand.

When he does, he freezes, seeing me and his antenna. Before he can say a word, I shove them right in his face:

"Mike, you're my next door neighbor and I love ya, but I swear, you wake my wife at 2AM with this thing again and I'm gonna shove it up your ass. After I taser your rig to ashes."

"Buh...buh... buh..."

"You're making the lights in my bedroom flash like a discotheque, and it plays through my speakers even with the stereo unplugged. Get rid of that illegal amp & move the antenna some-fucking place besides right next to my bedroom." He just clutches his stuff to his chest and disappears around the fence without a word.

That was over a decade ago now... when I go back to San Antoine, I usually stop by with a 6-pack. We always laugh over it; it's like a ritual now or something.  :-DD

mnem
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« Last Edit: October 18, 2018, 11:55:49 pm by mnementh »
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Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18364 on: October 18, 2018, 11:45:26 pm »
Sorry AM. Long time ago now. Brain melted :)

Was a Midland 77 104.

Edit: actually might have been FM. Genuinely can’t remember. I still have it somewhere. Will dig it out at some point and play with it.

Edit 2: Don’t have the burner. I sold that when I was with girlfriend of that era. She was expensive to run  :-DD
So you was one of the naughty boys then eh? Midland 77 104 was AM and like your burner, highly illegal over here in the UK  >:D The UK standard was FM and was crap for range whereas AM could go for miles and miles and I never had the balls of steel to go for an AM set, but I was sorely tempted, frustrated as hell with the lack of range on the FM rigs, especially as I was covering loads of miles back in the day as a technical sales engineer and was using CB to try and dodge traffic hold ups.  :popcorn:
« Last Edit: October 19, 2018, 12:08:41 am by Specmaster »
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Offline Neomys Sapiens

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18365 on: October 18, 2018, 11:59:26 pm »
That's the sort of job I'd have liked to have done if I'm honest.

Really I think modern programming is a result of the ability to quickly screw things up and then quickly unscrew them in a never ending cycle. People tread more carefully when they had an EPROM erase / burn cycle every time they did something.  Engineering has a long lead time between design and outcome thus the risk benefit is balanced differently.

Edit: most fun I ever had in this space was hand assembling Z80 code with a pencil and paper. Took forever but it worked every time as I was scared of getting it wrong.

It was a lot more rewarding than what I ended up doing at AT&T; and yes, we had to mass-burn EPROMs every time there was a software change.  I believe there was just over a megabyte of code in that three-processor system; all 8086 mil parts running at a whopping 5 MHz.

Before we had a native assembler, a friend and I used to hand-assemble all our 6502 code; it was easy to test small routines that way.  Even today, he or I will msg one another with a string of hex bytes to make the other laugh, because we remember the story behind much of it.
You made me look up where I stashed my 80186 SOS rad-hard 16MHz specimen, just to be sure...
But 'efficient AND beautiful' in SW has a name for me, and that is 68k assembler.

On the topic of SW-developers and testing:
one such guy nearly had me send to ICELAND, to be flown up to some ugly troll-infested hill and take measurements on the unit, for which hardware I am responsible, because he somehow 'forgot' how to write successive commands into a register to cope with a documented FPGA bug. It worked before.
Now it doesn't work in the field. Two and a half SW versions in between. But the SW-dev team cries 'must be hardware'.
I'm still here. The backlog of SW-dev got a bit longer. The expert in question 're-learned' the trick from some Python code clobbered together by a HW-dev engineer for the production test stand. But as the credo is 'we are a Software company', the well deserved forty lashes with a sturdy RF cable won't happen.
 

Online mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18366 on: October 19, 2018, 12:09:50 am »
You can still hide under his desk and tie his shoelaces around his phone/PC's Cat5 cable...   :-DD

mnem
I would NEVER do that...  >:D
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Offline med6753

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18368 on: October 19, 2018, 12:18:32 am »
Ah yes, the good old CB days. To the FCC I was known as KBHY-5427. To the rest of the world I was “Led Foote”.

The rig was a totally barefoot RS TRC-424 40 channel AM only mobile rig run as a base unit. The only mod was a power mic to boost the audio a bit. The antenna was an omni base “Starduster” type that worked well. Mostly local talk but when conditions were right would shoot some skip. I used a scratch built power supply consisting of a fairly uncommon TO-3 case LM317K and a TO-3 case 2N3055 pass transistor. The voltage adjust is on the backside of case. I still have the power supply and use it on the bench. The CB rig is long gone.

Fun times.  :-+



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Offline GregDunn

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18369 on: October 19, 2018, 12:34:25 am »
It was a lot more rewarding than what I ended up doing at AT&T; and yes, we had to mass-burn EPROMs every time there was a software change.  I believe there was just over a megabyte of code in that three-processor system; all 8086 mil parts running at a whopping 5 MHz.

Before we had a native assembler, a friend and I used to hand-assemble all our 6502 code; it was easy to test small routines that way.  Even today, he or I will msg one another with a string of hex bytes to make the other laugh, because we remember the story behind much of it.
You made me look up where I stashed my 80186 SOS rad-hard 16MHz specimen, just to be sure...
But 'efficient AND beautiful' in SW has a name for me, and that is 68k assembler.

I hated 8080/8086 assembler.  A mix of 16-bit registers with 8-bit and 16-bit access instructions, plus that ugly segmented architecture.  All so they were "architecture compatible" with the old 4004/8008 chips.  It didn't help - you couldn't run the old software on the new machines - all it did was allow you to "translate" the assembler code for some types of programs.  Bleargh.  The 6502, by comparison, was a marvel of efficiency and orthogonality - they even came out with a 65816 that DID run the 6502 software. 

But the 68000 was like a PDP11 writ large; pretty much every instruction worked on every register and you didn't have to glue two registers end to end in order to get 32-bit addressing.  Too bad Motorola had no clue what they were doing in the microprocessor world and sank their own ship in the late 90s.
 

Offline Neomys Sapiens

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18370 on: October 19, 2018, 01:06:27 am »

I hated 8080/8086 assembler.  A mix of 16-bit registers with 8-bit and 16-bit access instructions, plus that ugly segmented architecture.  All so they were "architecture compatible" with the old 4004/8008 chips.  It didn't help - you couldn't run the old software on the new machines - all it did was allow you to "translate" the assembler code for some types of programs.  Bleargh.  The 6502, by comparison, was a marvel of efficiency and orthogonality - they even came out with a 65816 that DID run the 6502 software. 

But the 68000 was like a PDP11 writ large; pretty much every instruction worked on every register and you didn't have to glue two registers end to end in order to get 32-bit addressing.  Too bad Motorola had no clue what they were doing in the microprocessor world and sank their own ship in the late 90s.

No argument here. The Eurofighter is largely 68k based, as are the modern armoured systems over here (Puma, Boxer). A personal favorite is the 68376, which can do about everything, you just have to select your pin assignments very thoroughly. And I fought with teeth and claws when someone decided to exchange the 68k-based VME CPUs with (then) untried and new PowerPCs in a major aerospace project.

And yet, Intel showed that they could do something pretty with the i860 and the i960.
 

Offline Carl_Smith

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18371 on: October 19, 2018, 01:37:40 am »
The PowerPC has my favorite assembly language instruction, Enforce In Order Execution of I/O, abbreviated as EIEIO.

Offline GreyWoolfe

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18372 on: October 19, 2018, 01:38:40 am »
Ah yes, the good old CB days. To the FCC I was known as KBHY-5427. To the rest of the world I was “Led Foote”.

The rig was a totally barefoot RS TRC-424 40 channel AM only mobile rig run as a base unit. The only mod was a power mic to boost the audio a bit. The antenna was an omni base “Starduster” type that worked well. Mostly local talk but when conditions were right would shoot some skip. I used a scratch built power supply consisting of a fairly uncommon TO-3 case LM317K and a TO-3 case 2N3055 pass transistor. The voltage adjust is on the backside of case. I still have the power supply and use it on the bench. The CB rig is long gone.

Fun times.  :-+





My first radio was a Midland 23 channel, my 2nd and best radio was a President Teddy R.  I was KND-3913, High Times.  Radios had a Turner Plus 2 power mic attached.    The radios were mounted to slide lock mounts went back and forth between the car and the house.  House was a modified Shakespear big stick vertical and the moble was a K-40 with mag mount.  I only had the baby kicker in the car for a while and ended up selling it.  Fun times, indeed :-+

--From nmemeth--Some years after I got out of Children's Band, the fellow I lived next door to got himself a rig and a linear (hacked 10m linears were everywhere at the time, even the corner store) ran some RG-59/U (too cheap to spring for RG-8, or too dumb to make his own cables) out to a car antenna vise-gripped to the wooden fence between our properties. Every freaking idiot word he ratchet-jawed until 2AM would come out over the stereo in the bedroom. First night my wife woke me up so I turned off the stereo and it seemed to go away. The next night, it started again, and kept cranking out even though the stereo was off and unplugged, and it made the touch-light in the corner go batshit crazy.--

I ran into the same thing.  On one side, I was getting into the neighbor's kids' stereo.  I don't remember what I did but I did resolve that one.  The neighbor on the other side, old fart, would complain that I was getting into his little portable black and white TV.  I never got into his big color console TV with the outside antenna, just the little crappy TV with the rabbit ears.  Of course, he wouldn't watch the big TV, just the little one so he could complain.  No amelioration for him.  >:D
« Last Edit: October 19, 2018, 01:48:36 am by GreyWoolfe »
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Online mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18373 on: October 19, 2018, 02:23:40 am »
I'm sure that Mike's rig would have been fine if he'd put a properly tuned antenna/cable on the other side of the house, or probably even on the roof; most of those linears weren't too dirty (at least on 10m) unless you drove them to clipping. But where he had it was less than 10 feet away from both the stereo and the lamp, on a cheap little center-loaded antenna plumbed with premade RG-59/U. I have no doubt he didn't even know what SWR was, much less bother to tune. 

We had cable TV, so of course that never even noticed it. 

EDW-1483 "Roadkill".  :palm:

mnem
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« Last Edit: October 19, 2018, 02:34:43 am by mnementh »
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Online mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #18374 on: October 19, 2018, 03:20:38 am »
   

A quick heads-up for anyone wanting to try the machined 4mm bullets I use for RC and making patch cables... Amazon has a good deal on them right now, 20 pairs for $12 shipped Prime.

mnem
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