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Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

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bd139:
Some good points there. The thing is I’ve got this tiny little box which is my comms supply. It weighs about 800g and quite happily pumps out 30A without even getting warm. Switchers FTW. The feed for the radio uses stranded wire about 4mm across. It’s like rope.  Looking at the HP supply, one thing that put me off is the refurb cost as well. The main filter cap in it is 34,000uF at 40V with an appropriately high ripple current. Equivalent part now is £53+VAT. Definitely quieter than the switcher but that has a cheat control (noise offset) which allows you to shift the switching harmonics out of the pass band. Plus a huge ferrite ring.

I actually gave my “scariac” away a few days back to a member of the local amateur radio club so he can repair his boat anchors. He has more space than me as his wife left him   :-DD. Has a workshop and parts stock that would put anyone to shame. Tried to get him to join here but the computer is the devil as far as he is concerned.

The female of the species is quite common in amateur radio circles. In fact the first radio amateur I ever met in the early 80s (I don’t classify my father’s CB escapades as official) was. She also showed me how to make my own fireworks  :-DD

mnementh:

--- Quote from: bd139 on June 12, 2018, 10:13:45 pm ---Nice work. Some good photos there. Professional quality.

@mnementh: can’t go wrong with anything thinkpad on it from experience. Monitors I’ve never had any problems with. I’ve had this thinkvision one for about 3 years and it was 3 years old when I got it. No dead pixels, nice bright panel. Had a duff cap in it a year ago and that was a £0.50 fix.  If you go for LED backlit ones with 1000:1 contrast they seem to live longer. The thinkvision ones are also terribly over engineered compared to most brands. Can’t go bigger than 22 here - not enough room!

Did my full license exam this evening and passed. That means I can have a slightly more legitimately poor excuse to buy lots of RF test gear and play with it. Ho Ho Ho  :-DD

But alas slacking is over as everything is unblocked so I shall return to computerland and slog out these problems for a few days at least. The eBay engine is still hammering away looking for bargains on my behalf though thus TEA is automated while my attention is diverted.. It found a couple of monster HP supplies this evening but they are too damn big and heavy to justify purchasing. I got the tape measure out and checked  :(

Going to bed!  :=\

--- End quote ---

Congrats on getting your cert! We all knew you were certifiable, but now you have the paper to prove it!  :-DD

I can tell you this from personal experience... I used to feel the way you do about monitors; I spent some time working weekends at an e-cycle house recapping them when flat-screens were still worth the time to triage and repair them in large lots. The arrangement was straightforward; I got 1/3 of what I fixed. I could take units, I could take the cash they sold for, or I could trade value for value as long as it added up the same. They let me take all the lexan diffuser panels out of the defective screens I wanted, and they let me cherry pick the laptops and PCs at discount too. Was a good deal until we had a disagreement over what LCD projectors were worth; rather than let them eat my lunch trying to fix units that cost more for a good bulb to test with than they were worth, I moved on.

Coming back around to the point; I got pretty jaded about LCDs, I discovered they were all cheap sh** once you got the back off. I had new ones on my PC every week burning them in and using them before I sold them with a system. I just treated them like a disposable commodity.




MonoPrice Over/Under

Anyhoo... while I was doing this, we got several Compaq/LG widescreens in that were still under MFR warranty (big old 5-year warranty sticker on the back), and they traded them up to the next size larger. When the new ones arrived I was like "Holy hell... these are so much brighter and crisper." From then on, I only bought new for my own use; I'd stack the old one as a second monitor over my main monitor on one of these (for a while I had a 32" LG 2K monitor on there; that was sweet making PCBs with Eagle  ;) ). Without fail, every time I would be astonished at how much crisper and clearer new looked side by side with old; and yes, this continued even into LED backlit models.

As a result, on something that's as cheap as a monitor nowadays, I'd much rather get the first 3-4 years of tip-top performance and save the eyestrain than put up with someone else's sloppy seconds.


mnem
That's muh story and ah'm stickin' teww itt.

Specmaster:

--- Quote from: bd139 on June 13, 2018, 06:51:16 am ---Some good points there. The thing is I’ve got this tiny little box which is my comms supply. It weighs about 800g and quite happily pumps out 30A without even getting warm. Switchers FTW. The feed for the radio uses stranded wire about 4mm across. It’s like rope.  Looking at the HP supply, one thing that put me off is the refurb cost as well. The main filter cap in it is 34,000uF at 40V with an appropriately high ripple current. Equivalent part now is £53+VAT. Definitely quieter than the switcher but that has a cheat control (noise offset) which allows you to shift the switching harmonics out of the pass band. Plus a huge ferrite ring.

I actually gave my “scariac” away a few days back to a member of the local amateur radio club so he can repair his boat anchors. He has more space than me as his wife left him   :-DD. Has a workshop and parts stock that would put anyone to shame. Tried to get him to join here but the computer is the devil as far as he is concerned.

The female of the species is quite common in amateur radio circles. In fact the first radio amateur I ever met in the early 80s (I don’t classify my father’s CB escapades as official) was. She also showed me how to make my own fireworks  :-DD

--- End quote ---
Well you surely already knew how to make your own bangers that 34000 uF cap would make a monster one [emoji16]

From mobile device so predictive text might have struck again [emoji83]

bd139:
@mnemneth: The newer panels are orders of magnitude better than anything that was being recycled a few years back. However these aren’t usually refurbed here. There’s a massive surplus of monitors due to stupid purchasing in IT teams. NHS are particularly bad at this. One trust had about 600 boxes new monitors go to a reseller because when you buy in volume you are buying per seat. So there are two tiers: discards and new out of box. Discards go straight in WEEE and are dismantled and recycled. It’s cheaper to recycle those than sell them off. They never see the market. The rest get shipped in pallets to resellers who discard any transit damaged units. What turns up is usually a new unit that has been sitting in stores for 3 years. They fire it up and sell as used because there’s no packaging. If I get two years out of a monitor I’m happy. For £1.58/month :)

Same with servers. The DL380g8 I just bought hasn’t even been fired up.

tl;dr: in EU, WEEE and IT purchasing killed off the tail end refurb market.

Anyway verdict out it’s arriving around 09:45-10:45 :)

@specmaster: that cap would go with a big boom. It’s about 4 inches across :D

bd139:
That worked! Perfect condition entirely as new. No dead pixels and it's so bright I had to crank it right down.



Excuse the windows 10 sin; it's currently connected to my windows desktop machine.

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