Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[med6753]

K2 checkpoint day 1: control board nearly done. Missing a few ICs and a couple of extra bodges required on back. This is a really nice board. All the parts are top quality branded ones as well unlike the QCXs I built which were made from hair-legged chinese shite resistors. Feels "HP" in quality.

Looks great - keep the pics coming.

Well I ain't got no kit here today LOL. Friend asked me to see if his Icom IC-2720 (2m/70cm) transceiver was repairable. It had low (5W) output power otherwise working OK. He had been using it as a crossband repeater many hours at a time. This radio does not have a good reputation. I researched the issue and it seems to be a recurring problem with this radio involving a driver to the final RF power output. The suspect is Q25 2SK3075.

After examination on the bench this was indeed the problem. It came off in pieces due to the heat damage it had endured. Looking at the bottom of the board you can see the heat sink compound was all dried up. Can obtain the part from Mouser for under $7.

Oh, also observed that ALL of the screws that hold the main board to the case were already loose by at least one turn. Hmmmmmm ..... 

Lucky for you that the "gorilla" stopped short of just loosening the screws. I hate it when a fellow supposed "tech" brings me something to look at and clearly someone has monkeyed around with it prior and I'm expected to clean up the mess and fix it. 

[GregDunn]

Is anyone else going to the huge Dayton hamfest this weekend?  I'm only going on Friday due to an overbooked weekend, but I'm hoping to have some fun browsing the outside flea market - haven't been there in a few years...

I am, in fact, making the pilgrimage. I will be at FDIM and, I imagine, at the flea market on Friday. I don't really have a plan other than showing up and seeing what happens.  Right now I am in Denver airport, waiting for my delayed leg to Dayton, so I probably won't get to the hotel until midnight.

I haven't shaved for a couple of days, got my hobo clothes, a bag full of badges with my call sign on them, my Tektronix ball cap, and an empty duffle, so I am ready for anything. 

You'll blend right in.      My contrarian personality compels me to wear a band T-shirt, a proper sun hat and extra comfy walking shoes so people don't confuse me with all the other codgers.   

When I was a regular attendee, all the great stuff was gone by noon Friday, so the sooner I could get in and scope out the big tables the better.  I was reasonably good at spotting the interesting gear while moving at a dead run.

[VK5RC]

If a MAMIL gets TEA can lead to a VOMIT
Middle
Aged
Man
In
Lycra

Trail
Equipment
Addiction

Very
Old
Man
In
Tights

Apologies Rob
Photos from today's ride

[worsthorse]

Is anyone else going to the huge Dayton hamfest this weekend?  I'm only going on Friday due to an overbooked weekend, but I'm hoping to have some fun browsing the outside flea market - haven't been there in a few years...

I am, in fact, making the pilgrimage. I will be at FDIM and, I imagine, at the flea market on Friday. I don't really have a plan other than showing up and seeing what happens.  Right now I am in Denver airport, waiting for my delayed leg to Dayton, so I probably won't get to the hotel until midnight.

I haven't shaved for a couple of days, got my hobo clothes, a bag full of badges with my call sign on them, my Tektronix ball cap, and an empty duffle, so I am ready for anything. 

You'll blend right in.      My contrarian personality compels me to wear a band T-shirt, a proper sun hat and extra comfy walking shoes so people don't confuse me with all the other codgers.   

When I was a regular attendee, all the great stuff was gone by noon Friday, so the sooner I could get in and scope out the big tables the better.  I was reasonably good at spotting the interesting gear while moving at a dead run.

I am comfortably lodged in the Fairborn Holiday Inn, our QRP holy site, and ready for a day of shaking hands and listening to tall tales. I am not really gear shopping - too hard to get stuff home I am guessing - but I am going to be looking for components, mostly parts required to build circuits in EMRFD and Solid State Design for Radio Amateurs.

If I hit the lottery, I will come across a stash of Miller slug tuned coils, crystal filters, and dual gate MOSFETs that everyone else has somehow missed.  Well that plus hoping the Elecraft is running a sale so I can give in on my newly re-energized K2 envy...

[Cubdriver]

Some day I'll make the pilgrimage to Dayton.  I've been warned by those who know me and the sort of things I'm inclined to collect, and have been before, that I will need a trailer.

It's probably best that I'm not going....

-Pat

[0culus]

Some day I'll make the pilgrimage to Dayton.  I've been warned by those who know me and the sort of things I'm inclined to collect, and have been before, that I will need a trailer 18 wheeler.

It's probably best that I'm not going....

-Pat

Fixed that for you. 

[GregDunn]

I used to find a ton of neat stuff when I didn't have the money in my pocket,    and now I go looking for things and the sources seem to have all dried up.  I vaguely remember about 20 years ago coming across a table piled high with fairly modern HP gear, any one piece of which cost more than my entire bankroll.  The Ft. Wayne fest last fall actually yielded some fairly nice gear at bargain prices, and if I were a Tek scope fanatic I could have done very well indeed.  The really interesting (to me) gear was being ignored while everyone was looking for components and blinky lights.  My hope this year is that the weather at Dayton on Friday morning is good and that no one else is looking for high-end DMMs or calibrators.   

I never fell down the ham radio rabbit hole, for better or worse, so I can slide past many of the vendors without regret.  That's where most of the attendees seem to congregate, too, so it gives me a little space to scan the tables for neglected TE.

[Specmaster]

@kj7e: thanks for the teardown photos. I miss mine although it was older and more poopey than yours.

I will obtain another one when it goes past 

Boring K2 update: all parts inventoried. 3 parts missing. 1 resistor (meh I have one). 1 SSB crystal (not needed for days yet). 1 ceramic cap in noise blanker (not needed for even more days yet). Not bad!

That K2 kit sounds exciting, I must say that it also looks the part and does indeed have a passing resemblance to a SB-104. Reminds me have a SW receiver I used to as  teenager, no readouts but it worked well. Spent many happy hours listening to hams chatting away all over the globe. All I had for an aerial was about 50 yards of a single core cable that I fed out though an air vent and ran it the length of the garden. Worked well I thought. I remember looking at a lovely radio (might have been a SB104, the shop sold Heathkit), in my local electronic shop, the same one I got my first scope (Cosser) from. [emoji41][emoji6][emoji848]

Sent from my POT-LX1 using Tapatalk

[tggzzz]

Strange machine with a "repair opportunity". Looks like it might contain a 7-decade KVD.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Guildline-9975-Current-Comparator-Resistance-Bridge-Galvanometer-115-230V-50VA/173903985031

[beanflying]

Time for the month of Fleet Recalibration to begin. The long overdue twosome have returned and my Agilent 34461A has become reborn a Keysight 34461A thanks to a firmware issue.

Celebratory Beer being opened because it is 5pm while I decide on a fleet recalibration order

EDIT: Now settled to within 5PPM and closing it seems 

[Mr. Scram]

Time for the month of Fleet Recalibration to begin. The long overdue twosome have returned and my Agilent 34461A has become reborn a Keysight 34461A thanks to a firmware issue.

Celebratory Beer being opened because it is 5pm while I decide on a fleet recalibration order

EDIT: Now settled to within 5PPM and closing it seems 

That's not the worst shelf to be looking at.

[bd139]

Provision for a PIC18F452? the PIC18F4520 is also pin compatible

Yeah there's a couple of PIC16C77's in there as well. C! If you look at the board though you can see how long this kit has been around. 2002 was the date of this board revision and the design was established in 1998/1999. It's been going a very long time and they've been very conservative n fixing things unnecessarily. Their new radios have new parts in but they are all partially DSP based and FRU assembly, not repairable and not much fun.

Well I ain't got no kit here today LOL. Friend asked me to see if his Icom IC-2720 (2m/70cm) transceiver was repairable. It had low (5W) output power otherwise working OK. He had been using it as a crossband repeater many hours at a time. This radio does not have a good reputation. I researched the issue and it seems to be a recurring problem with this radio involving a driver to the final RF power output. The suspect is Q25 2SK3075.

After examination on the bench this was indeed the problem. It came off in pieces due to the heat damage it had endured. Looking at the bottom of the board you can see the heat sink compound was all dried up. Can obtain the part from Mouser for under $7.

Oh, also observed that ALL of the screws that hold the main board to the case were already loose by at least one turn. Hmmmmmm ..... 

Sounds like a one previous monkey with a screwdriver owner job! I noticed in the Yaesu stuff I've taken to bits it seems to be pretty well put together i.e. screw lock and decent mounting hardware. Never been inside Icom stuff. Well not yet.

Are these "Oh, fu-u-u-u..." type bodges or "We've been using this design for 2 decades, but still haven't gotten around to updating the board for modern components..." type bodges?

There are no really oh fuck ones. Nothing that scares me anyway. So far there are two TH capacitors that need to be soldered across pins on the rear of the board to shape the keying waveform. That really should have been done with a board respin. The other things are parts availability so the MC1350 IF amps and SA602 mixers are now only available in SOIC rather than the DIP footprints. Rather than them respin the boards (I assume they bought a fuck ton of these years ago) they actually provide each IC in a little antistatic bag pre-mounted carrier board neatly packed with an A4 sheet of paper explaining how to mount it and some 22 AWG solid wire or header pins for mounting it.  They do this because you can sub your own DIP MC1350/SA612 in if you want (I might do this as I have enough of both of them).

I am comfortably lodged in the Fairborn Holiday Inn, our QRP holy site, and ready for a day of shaking hands and listening to tall tales. I am not really gear shopping - too hard to get stuff home I am guessing - but I am going to be looking for components, mostly parts required to build circuits in EMRFD and Solid State Design for Radio Amateurs.

If I hit the lottery, I will come across a stash of Miller slug tuned coils, crystal filters, and dual gate MOSFETs that everyone else has somehow missed.  Well that plus hoping the Elecraft is running a sale so I can give in on my newly re-energized K2 envy...

Excellent books. I have both

Go on you know you want to 

That K2 kit sounds exciting, I must say that it also looks the part and does indeed have a passing resemblance to a SB-104. Reminds me have a SW receiver I used to as  teenager, no readouts but it worked well. Spent many happy hours listening to hams chatting away all over the globe. All I had for an aerial was about 50 yards of a single core cable that I fed out though an air vent and ran it the length of the garden. Worked well I thought. I remember looking at a lovely radio (might have been a SB104, the shop sold Heathkit), in my local electronic shop, the same one I got my first scope (Cosser) from. [emoji41][emoji6][emoji848]

Good times. I miss that in a way. SWL stuff was what got me into this years ago. Among the piles of recovered crap, I had a Grundig Yacht Boy which was discarded by my mother when something smaller came along. Unfortunately the aerial had broken off and it didn't have a BFO so I made one from a recycled transistor radio and some instructions in a Bernard Babani book. Tuning SSB/CW on it was touchy as hell. I should have added a fine tune to it but didn't work that out until recently. The FET cost me the week's pocket money back then

Looked up the BFO I used: Single frequency SSB/CW resolver - p52

https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Bookshelf/Author-Groups/Babani/Babani-50-FET-Projects.pdf

I had a lot of Babani books as everyone used to give me W H Smith vouchers for birthdays back then. My mother encouraged me to buy history books and things but I came back with calculators, pens, Babani books and electronics magazines much to her dismay.

This for an antenna, as yours, was a single core cable to the end of the garden. This was made of bits of mains cable I had got out of a skip and soldered together and required repairing about once a week. I heard numbers stations.

Alas women, lack of money, discovery of CB for a bit and general disgust of the hams in the 1980s prevented access to this until recently 

[med6753]

You got me curious so I went to the Elecraft site and checked it out. Yikes, the K2 ain't cheap.  No wonder you had a fire sale to pay for it. 

[bd139]

Yeah it burned properly. Especially when UPS turned up with a £225 VAT/handling bill on top of that 

Fire sale going badly. Anyone want some test gear?   

Edit: I figured as I built it, I won't want to let it go so it'll be around for at least 10 years which means it has a low TCO compared to buying other stuff from the big vendors and getting bored with it after 6 months and chucking it on ebay. $25/month over that period including all consumables, antennas, keys, ancillary equipment isn't bad for a hobby. One of my colleagues bought a $500 golf driver at xmas and fucked it up already for example.

[med6753]

One of my colleagues bought a $500 golf driver at xmas and fucked it up already for example.

Well, there's so many fails there let me see if I can count them.

Fail 1: spending $500 on a golf driver.
Fail 2: How do you fuck up a driver?
Fail 3: Golf itself. Dumb game. Chasing a little white ball across thousands of yards of green grass holds no appeal to me.
Fail 4: The ridiculous outfits some golfers wear.
I could go on but I'll stop there. 

[Mr. Scram]

One of my colleagues bought a $500 golf driver at xmas and fucked it up already for example.

Well, there's so many fails there let me see if I can count them.

Fail 1: spending $500 on a golf driver.
Fail 2: How do you fuck up a driver?
Fail 3: Golf itself. Dumb game. Chasing a little white ball across thousands of yards of green grass holds no appeal to me.
Fail 4: The ridiculous outfits some golfers wear.
I could go on but I'll stop there. 

Drivers are hollow and easy to ruin if you're careless or incompetent. Few sports make any sense when you look at them factually.

[bd139]

@med: agree totally. The guy also bought a golf cart because he is too lazy to do the exercise bit as well. TBH you can usually divide golf stick whackers into two groups: 1) people who actually like golf (there aren't many) ... 2) people who like to tell everyone that they play golf (lots) for the status. The dude above is a class 2.

I don't get it myself. We used to live next to a golf club when I was a kid and we had a whippet dog called benjy. If you wanted a laugh you'd let it out through the back fence and onto the golf course and it'd run around in circles like lightning stealing all the balls and pissing off the golfers. It'd come back by itself when it had caused chaos and wanted some food. That was far more fun!

[mnementh]

(SNIP)

Oh, also observed that ALL of the screws that hold the main board to the case were already loose by at least one turn. Hmmmmmm ..... 

Lucky for you that the "gorilla" stopped short of just loosening the screws. I hate it when a fellow supposed "tech" brings me something to look at and clearly someone has monkeyed around with it prior and I'm expected to clean up the mess and fix it. 

Ehhh... Having worked on a LOT of mobile electronics, I can tell you from experience it's not unusual for screws to back out on their own from vibration and temp-related expansion-contraction, especially screws in active components and PCBs.

This seems to have as much to do with the construction techniques common to this kind of gear as it does application; I've had mobile radios I know I repaired and reassembled with my own hand, used on a bench for a year or two, and later found screws inside "not really tight" or even partially backed out. There's a reason manufacturers often glue the heads/threads of screws; in some cases, where a screw provides a mission-critical ground, I've even seen them solder the head of the screw to the pad underneath. 

While I loathe ham-fisted gorilla tech-ery as much as the next guy (maybe even as much as you ), if I'm honest with myself, I know two things:

1) We ALL take our turn being the ham-fisted gorilla at one time or another. 

2) There's enough guilt to go around without making up more.   

3) The Devil, she never sleeps. 

mnem
*puttin' on muh NOMEX underoos right now*

[ArthurDent]

Med6753 (post 31467)
Fail 1: spending $500 on a golf driver.
Fail 2: How do you fuck up a driver?
Fail 3: Golf itself. Dumb game. Chasing a little white ball across thousands of yards of green grass holds no appeal to me.
Fail 4: The ridiculous outfits some golfers wear.

Reminds me of this Robin Williams skit

[GreyWoolfe]

Is anyone else going to the huge Dayton hamfest this weekend?  I'm only going on Friday due to an overbooked weekend, but I'm hoping to have some fun browsing the outside flea market - haven't been there in a few years...

I am, in fact, making the pilgrimage. I will be at FDIM and, I imagine, at the flea market on Friday. I don't really have a plan other than showing up and seeing what happens.  Right now I am in Denver airport, waiting for my delayed leg to Dayton, so I probably won't get to the hotel until midnight.

I haven't shaved for a couple of days, got my hobo clothes, a bag full of badges with my call sign on them, my Tektronix ball cap, and an empty duffle, so I am ready for anything. 

Did you remember not to shower for a couple of days, your 12 HTs, dayglow vest and hat with antenna farm?  If not, you are not making the proper impression. 

[mnementh]

(SNIP)
If I hit the lottery, I will come across a stash of Miller slug tuned coils, crystal filters, and dual gate MOSFETs that everyone else has somehow missed.  Well that plus hoping the Elecraft is running a sale so I can give in on my newly re-energized K2 envy...

eBay auction: #273843736218

Wanders off stage-left, whistling innocently... 

Are these "Oh, fu-u-u-u..." type bodges or "We've been using this design for 2 decades, but still haven't gotten around to updating the board for modern components..." type bodges?

There are no really oh fuck ones. Nothing that scares me anyway. So far there are two TH capacitors that need to be soldered across pins on the rear of the board to shape the keying waveform. That really should have been done with a board respin. The other things are parts availability so the MC1350 IF amps and SA602 mixers are now only available in SOIC rather than the DIP footprints. Rather than them respin the boards (I assume they bought a fuck ton of these years ago) they actually provide each IC in a little antistatic bag pre-mounted carrier board neatly packed with an A4 sheet of paper explaining how to mount it and some 22 AWG solid wire or header pins for mounting it.  They do this because you can sub your own DIP MC1350/SA612 in if you want (I might do this as I have enough of both of them).

Well, no... when I said " 'Oh, fu-u-u-u...' type bodges" I meant the self-inflicted kind, not manufacturer-created. 

There's lots of good reasons to NOT respin a board; I find it hard to believe they're still selling from a load of boards they bought 18 years ago. 

Could be for simple conformity: so you can sell replacement boards for repair parts and not have to worry about which revision you send out, because none of your "production" boards have any significant differences. If you have to make that happen with a SOIC breakout board, I feel that is a legitimate reason. I find a lot of this in hobbyist and laboratory stuff.

Another reason could be that the guy who actually designed the board and has the files to respin it left the company and didn't leave anything but the Gerbers, etc. or worse, went silent key a decade ago, and nobody actually has the originals.

I don't know many engineers possessed of the sheer perversity to re-create an editable version of somebody else's project so they can "continue that person's work". Most will simply design "rework kits" to keep that project afloat until they can get paid for the next major revision, which they plan to do from scratch. Job security, baby. 

Yes, I know you can import Gerbers and work with the resultant project file to some extent; but even in modern stuff like Altium it's still a PITA and you don't KNOW it got every circuit RIGHT unless you compare/draw them yourself.

Or maybe it's as I originally surmised: You have an established product, the people who want it like the fact it's stayed essentially the same for decades, and you can't be arsed. Especially now that you have the K3+ to sell to the touchscreen crowd. 

mnem
 

[med6753]

Med6753 (post 31467)
Fail 1: spending $500 on a golf driver.
Fail 2: How do you fuck up a driver?
Fail 3: Golf itself. Dumb game. Chasing a little white ball across thousands of yards of green grass holds no appeal to me.
Fail 4: The ridiculous outfits some golfers wear.

Reminds me of this Robin Williams skit

And George Carlin's opinion of golf which I agree with.

[med6753]

1) We ALL take our turn being the ham-fisted gorilla at one time or another. 

 

[beanflying]

Anyone need a stash of Tek Modules  eBay auction: #163684152715

[med6753]

Tempting but there appears to be a lot of junk among possible scores. Besides, I don't have the room.