Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

This thread gets more surreal by the minute 

SSB module for the K2 built and installed and aligned. It is now finished. Until I get mugged for Elecraft for more options. Have made two contacts on it so far with a bit of wire up in the trees outside. The built in ATU just matches any old shitty bit of wire - am impressed!

You know what that means? Time for TE again now 

[Specmaster]

This thread gets more surreal by the minute 

SSB module for the K2 built and installed and aligned. It is now finished. Until I get mugged for Elecraft for more options. Have made two contacts on it so far with a bit of wire up in the trees outside. The built in ATU just matches any old shitty bit of wire - am impressed!

You know what that means? Time for TE again now 

Well done, no major issues either. Where were those 2 contacts, local or did that shitty wire really perform well for you?

[bsfeechannel]

I fixed the horizontal sweep issue of the RCA WO-505A. Twas a bad solder joint on the horizontial/sweep board. I wasn't anywhere near it when I recapped the power supply board but I must have disturbed it. Fixed now. Deoxit'ed all the controls. The sync is extremely unstable but gets better as scope warms up. It will barely sync on a square wave at all but pretty much OK on a sine wave. It points to leaky caps and there are numerous electrolytics on the horziontial/sweep board. So will inventory and change them all, including the vertical board.

Gonna let it cook for a while and see if there are any magic smoke issues.

   

Wonnerful.

I was curious about this jewel, and found this ad about the product published in the 1971 issue of Popular Electronics.

Its specs appear in this comparative table in the Electronics World magazine of the same year.

Here we learn that this is a solid state 5" DC-5MHz scope, with a 5.92 mV/cm vertical sensitivity, 1MΩ/25pF input impedance, cost $299 and was intended for TV H&V sweeps.

[URI]

And now on to some more TEA to fight the grumpyness   

In 2017 I bought my first HP 8110A 150MHz pulse generator. Working condition, nearly fully equipped with two channels and PLL synchronisation board (only the deskew option for binding up to 5x 8110As together was "missing").
But it it was mechanically damaged through shipping:


I got a full refund from ebay because of that.   

Because the display suffered from a severe burn in and was a bit hard to read I looked for a parts mule with a readable display.
Oh, yes, Keysight still offers these as a part for just around $1200..       
I found one and bought it for ~$350 incl. shipping.
This second unit was offered also with a damaged front panel but the metalwork were ok. The only channel module has a fault in the offset circuitry. It throws an error on selftest. But the display isn't as much burned in as the one of the first unit. In fact it is quiet well readable.   

In April this year I came across an offer on *bay for a parts mule 8110A without front panel. The photos showed that it was also missing some screws, all handles, the two fans... but the metalwork that hold the front panel were fine and intact. I made a low offer that was accepted when I renewed it after the first action ended without any bid. ( shipping was more than the price   )
Guess what, that parts unit was poorly packed (re-sent by Pitney Bowes..) and damaged. And just the chassis parts I wanted it for:   



I claimed the damage and was fully refunded by ebay. Ok in a way.

Some weeks ago I found a NOS 8110A front frame and bought it. Don't ask for money, it's an obsolete part.

So now I have three 8110A pulse generators with two damaged front panels, one NOS front frame, one chassis destroyed on the front left corner, one bent on the front right corner and one chassis intact:


Now I'm ready to build (aka frankensteining) one fully intact HP 8110A pulse generator from three partly damaged/not fully functional units. Perhaps I manage to build another one channel unit with weak display that I can sell to get some money for new projects.

[mnementh]

This thread gets more surreal by the minute 

SSB module for the K2 built and installed and aligned. It is now finished. Until I get mugged for Elecraft for more options. Have made two contacts on it so far with a bit of wire up in the trees outside. The built in ATU just matches any old shitty bit of wire - am impressed!

You know what that means? Time for TE again now 

Okay... howz this for mundane?

Right now I'm trying to figure out whether to bunch together all my LVDS and analog patch cables, or rather to separate along "Computer cable" and "general AV patch cable" lines. These criteria completely ignore specialty cables of both types that apply to my FPV hobbyism and my TE hobbyism, which will of course have their own place along with those hobby materials. 

  BTW - Well done keeping PF away during the construction process. Let's hope operation and tuneup remain similarly Noid-free!
    linky ↑

mnem
Now about those 3 bins of AC bricks and modular power cords... 

[med6753]

Wonnerful.

I was curious about this jewel, and found this ad about the product published in the 1971 issue of Popular Electronics.

Its specs appear in this comparative table in the Electronics World magazine of the same year.

Here we learn that this is a solid state 5" DC-5MHz scope, with a 5.92 mV/cm vertical sensitivity, 1MΩ/25pF input impedance, cost $299 and was intended for TV H&V sweeps.

I look at those old electronics magazines and it makes me sad.    Nothing like that exists anymore. 

Edit...the old RCA has been cooking for hours with no issues other than previously mentioned. 

[tautech]

Wonnerful.

I was curious about this jewel, and found this ad about the product published in the 1971 issue of Popular Electronics.

Its specs appear in this comparative table in the Electronics World magazine of the same year.

Here we learn that this is a solid state 5" DC-5MHz scope, with a 5.92 mV/cm vertical sensitivity, 1MΩ/25pF input impedance, cost $299 and was intended for TV H&V sweeps.

I look at those old electronics magazines and it makes me sad.    Nothing like that exists anymore. 

Nah, only better stuff ! 

[Specmaster]

Wonnerful.

I was curious about this jewel, and found this ad about the product published in the 1971 issue of Popular Electronics.

Its specs appear in this comparative table in the Electronics World magazine of the same year.

Here we learn that this is a solid state 5" DC-5MHz scope, with a 5.92 mV/cm vertical sensitivity, 1MΩ/25pF input impedance, cost $299 and was intended for TV H&V sweeps.

I look at those old electronics magazines and it makes me sad.    Nothing like that exists anymore. 

I second that emotion as well, nothing quite like having a magazine in your hand, you take it anywhere with you and read it as long as you can stay awake and have enough light 

[bd139]

This thread gets more surreal by the minute 

SSB module for the K2 built and installed and aligned. It is now finished. Until I get mugged for Elecraft for more options. Have made two contacts on it so far with a bit of wire up in the trees outside. The built in ATU just matches any old shitty bit of wire - am impressed!

You know what that means? Time for TE again now 

Well done, no major issues either. Where were those 2 contacts, local or did that shitty wire really perform well for you?

Was both on about 20m of hookup wire out the back bedroom window into the annoyingly overgrown council owned trees. Ground was terrible - earth pin from a 13A plug in a socket  . Worked a dude in Italy on 40m SSB. Shitty RST but it worked but he had some crazy antenna system and it was dead. Earlier CW Slovakia 20m. Lots of QSB but made it after two attempts. Didn't get what he was running. I need to improve my CW though - I am totally shit! Might disappear for a bit and work on that.

Okay... howz this for mundane?

Right now I'm trying to figure out whether to bunch together all my LVDS and analog patch cables, or rather to separate along "Computer cable" and "general AV patch cable" lines. These criteria completely ignore specialty cables of both types that apply to my FPV hobbyism and my TE hobbyism, which will of course have their own place along with those hobby materials. 

  BTW - Well done keeping PF away during the construction process. Let's hope operation and tuneup remain similarly Noid-free!
    linky ↑

mnem
Now about those 3 bins of AC bricks and modular power cords... 

I just threw away a very large supermarket bag of assorted cables. I figured that I don't have the space for the damn things. I'll probably need one next week. Amazon will get a deal out of it.

LMAO at The Noid. Don't think we got that at Dominos here. The history of the Noid was an interesting read. Definitely one noid you need to avoid

Wonnerful.

I was curious about this jewel, and found this ad about the product published in the 1971 issue of Popular Electronics.

Its specs appear in this comparative table in the Electronics World magazine of the same year.

Here we learn that this is a solid state 5" DC-5MHz scope, with a 5.92 mV/cm vertical sensitivity, 1MΩ/25pF input impedance, cost $299 and was intended for TV H&V sweeps.

I look at those old electronics magazines and it makes me sad.    Nothing like that exists anymore. 

I second that emotion as well, nothing quite like having a magazine in your hand, you take it anywhere with you and read it as long as you can stay awake and have enough light 

I have less fond memories of electronics magazines. I was a regular of ETI and Practical Wireless here. The former was basically not very good and the latter was a plague upon the planet. You NEVER built anything from PW until at least 3 issues after the article had been released and everyone else had found all the problems and written in to the magazines and got errata produced. And some of the tutorials were just completely wrong and written by someone who probably only put transistors up their butt.

Edit: I'm sure with PW that some of the projects never worked at all actually and the authors lied so they didn't get caught by the publisher and left unpaid then blamed the failures on the readers. I revisited a couple of attempts at things in there when I was older and knew which end of the soldering iron to hold and some of the designs just couldn't have worked or only worked by coincidence for the initial designer. Some of the success was because the original author clearly used bargain bag transistors from bi-pak which had precisely SFA gain because if you used a good one it'd burst into oscillation and self destruct. Hrmph. Learned about miller capacitance then!

[tggzzz]

Never bought Practical Wireless. Did buy Wireless World and ETI.

 I had blissfully forgotten BiPak, and it's ilk, but I suspect I could still find some unmarked BC108 transistors.

[bd139]

I've still got a bag somewhere. Like hell they were BC108s 

UMUT = UnMarked UnTested = shit!

Edit: had a bag. Just realised I chucked the damn things in a bin.

[bitseeker]

Second furphy (look it up non Aussies)

Thanks, I did. I shall appropriate it as "fake news" is rather worn out these days.

[bitseeker]

"As long as it keeps pouring, our boys will fight to Hell and back; Foster's is our most important armament."

mnem
Foster's: Australian for AMMUNITION.

Hmm, I've got some Ozzie ammo in the kitchen. Look out!

[beanflying]

"As long as it keeps pouring, our boys will fight to Hell and back; Foster's is our most important armament."

mnem
Foster's: Australian for AMMUNITION.

Hmm, I've got some Ozzie ammo in the kitchen. Look out!

It's our chemical weapons program to the world 

[bitseeker]

This is what I've been working on. A shelf unit to go above the TV. Purpose is to put some of my scopes on display rather than collecting dust under the bench. They can now get dusted once a week.  And every once in a while I'll rotate which scopes are on display. Also, that will be an excellent location for the etched Tektronix logo when Bean let's me know how much he wants for one.

Some guys put sports trophies on display or animal heads. I beg to be different. That picture behind will move when I repaint the living room later this Summer.



And yes, I have.......   

[Styx - Too Much Time On My Hands]

Looking good, med! You can have them do some scope demos, too.

On a related note (ahem), after watching that Styx vid, a few recommended videos later and I ended up on AC/DC .

[bitseeker]

Yes, we are extremely grumpy and pissed off old men. 

Now let's get back to TEA because the very mention of "Trump" raises my blood pressure. 

I fixed the horizontal sweep issue of the RCA WO-505A. Twas a bad solder joint on the horizontial/sweep board. I wasn't anywhere near it when I recapped the power supply board but I must have disturbed it. Fixed now. Deoxit'ed all the controls. The sync is extremely unstable but gets better as scope warms up. It will barely sync on a square wave at all but pretty much OK on a sine wave. It points to leaky caps and there are numerous electrolytics on the horziontial/sweep board. So will inventory and change them all, including the vertical board.

Gonna let it cook for a while and see if there are any magic smoke issues.

   

Awesome! Med, the scope doctor, is in the house.

[mnementh]

  BTW - Well done keeping PF away during the construction process. Let's hope operation and tuneup remain similarly Noid-free!
    linky ↑

mnem
Now about those 3 bins of AC bricks and modular power cords... 

I just threw away a very large supermarket bag of assorted cables. I figured that I don't have the space for the damn things. I'll probably need one next week. Amazon will get a deal out of it.

LMAO at The Noid. Don't think we got that at Dominos here. The history of the Noid was an interesting read. Definitely one noid you need to avoid
(SNIP)
I have less fond memories of electronics magazines. I was a regular of ETI and Practical Wireless here. The former was basically not very good and the latter was a plague upon the planet. You NEVER built anything from PW until at least 3 issues after the article had been released and everyone else had found all the problems and written in to the magazines and got errata produced. And some of the tutorials were just completely wrong and written by someone who probably only put transistors up their butt.

Edit: I'm sure with PW that some of the projects never worked at all actually and the authors lied so they didn't get caught by the publisher and left unpaid then blamed the failures on the readers. I revisited a couple of attempts at things in there when I was older and knew which end of the soldering iron to hold and some of the designs just couldn't have worked or only worked by coincidence for the initial designer. Some of the success was because the original author clearly used bargain bag transistors from bi-pak which had precisely SFA gain because if you used a good one it'd burst into oscillation and self destruct. Hrmph. Learned about miller capacitance then!

I wish I only had a grocery bag full to triage... 

Dunno about The Noid, he was a '80s thing; and by 1990 he was all done. I don't know that Dominos had managed to infect y'all on t'other side of the pond by then. 

    I remember when I was a teenager growing up on the farm in central New York; there was this Electronics store in Corning that carried ACME ELECTRONICS Grab Bags & mystery boxes. They deliberately used the same old Victorian font and coloring as in Looney Tunes; I used to joke that one of these days I was going to get Wile E. Coyote in my box. 

I'd drive down there once a month or so and buy a couple 2lb boxes or a 5lb box; one time the box had 3 car stereos in it, all repairable, and another time it was full of 1KV epoxy-roll capacitors in 0.1-1.0uF sizes.  Usually, though, it was the typical mix of discretes and DIP sockets and switches and pots. Did get lucky with a shedload of NiCds just when I needed them; enough for my project plus a backup plus enough to sell and pay for the next two excursions. I remember getting one that was all MRF-series transistors and then being terribly disappointed to find they were UHF-up power transistors and useless for my dreams of building a humongous boom-box power amp. Had I known what they were worth & where to take them, I could have sold them for enough to buy any amplifier made at the time, and probably a car to put it in. 

I remember the Red Ten stores too... before they got taken over by Tandy-Radidio Shank. They had transistor/resisitor/capacitor/inductor/Damifino grab bags too; but plastic baggies so you could at least pick through the rows of them on the tables and make sure you got a few in your assortment that were suitable.

I remember Radio Electronics and Popular Electronics with their annual Experimenter's Handbooks; even subscribed to Nuts&Volts when they offered it as a perq. OMG... and BYTE !!!

mnem
*Impairing Productivity since Nineteen Mumblety-Mumble*

[bitseeker]

I remember Radio Electronics and Popular Electronics with their annual Experimenter's Handbooks; even subscribed to Nuts&Volts when they offered it as a perq. OMG... and BYTE !!!

Oh, yes! I used to go to the library and read them a year at a time (as an EE student, what else do you do with hours of down time between classes?). The funniest thing was recognizing projects from those magazines when the "textbook engineers" presented "their" ideas for senior projects.

[med6753]

Radio-Electronics was the mag I subscribed to for many years. And any project from that mag that I built always worked properly. The DCV/ACV reference that I have was one of those projects. They finally closed up in 2003. 

[0culus]

I remember Radio Electronics and Popular Electronics with their annual Experimenter's Handbooks; even subscribed to Nuts&Volts when they offered it as a perq. OMG... and BYTE !!!

Oh, yes! I used to go to the library and read them a year at a time (as an EE student, what else do you do with hours of down time between classes?). The funniest thing was recognizing projects from those magazines when the "textbook engineers" presented "their" ideas for senior projects.

Now that's funny. 

[bitseeker]

Yep, the good ol' days.

[0culus]

Pretty much like some students in my computer science program way back in one of the basic programming classes, who copied code from the internet for the lab final...and didn't even get the right programming language!!  (we were supposed to only use ANSI C)

[URI]

Pretty much like some students in my computer science program way back in one of the basic programming classes, who copied code from the internet for the lab final...and didn't even get the right programming language!!  (we were supposed to only use ANSI C)

That's poor attention to detail, isn't it?   
But there were similar "experts" in my EE class, too. The Prof. made a sarcastic joke one time after returning a test that next time* the cheaters should please try to hide their cheating attempts..   

*- to my and the satisfaction of the other non-cheaters "next time" meant the cheaters had to repeat and write another test..

[mnementh]

http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/exercises/Exm-RoyaltyPaymentsRpt/Prg-LibRoyaltyRpt.htm

http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/exercises/Exm-USSRshipRpt/Prg-USSRshipRpt.htm

https://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/pinups/pinup00.txt (nsfw) 

mnem
 

[tggzzz]

I've still got a bag somewhere. Like hell they were BC108s 

UMUT = UnMarked UnTested = shit!

Edit: had a bag. Just realised I chucked the damn things in a bin.

Yeah, but they were affordable back then. Besides if they had an h_FE>10 they would have worked in most of my circuits!

I threw away some of those 'orrible enormous mustard capacitors, before I used fleabay and saw the prices audiofools were paying for them