Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Neomys Sapiens]

The only dance I know by heart is Pogo and I give 2 shits of a f..k about any feral kids that are standing in the way 

as for the Rottweiler part, upon retirement I hope to get one of those Malinois that are employed by the Austrian special forces.
They not only take care of the problem, they also get rid of any evidence.

Huh. They recently got rid of their own handler in one case. Although one has to wait for the investigation report to know what really happened.

[mnementh]

Short version: Developed a taste for asshole.

mnem
"...and the rest was just tasty his-s-s-to-o-o-re-e-e-e!"

[tggzzz]

Prior to the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976 a few people in the UK used to keep Leopards, Lions, Jaguars and the like as pets. Although I can see the sense in it, part of me has always regretted that I couldn't keep a Leopard.

That's bad luck; leopards are fun to own.

Although you can't see it, I read your message while to 'puter was resting on the back of my leopard. The screen shows the message to which this is a reply.

[mansaxel]

Yes, that would be the "sausage-grinder cluster-fuckery that signal may have been subjected to in the interim as part of the recording process" I was talking about. 

It is quite amazing sitting in the control room and listening to the surround ambience of a mountain top as of 20ms ago. A 4-microphone array panned over the 5.1 Genelec system in the control room is quite believable. Even though there was no special and expensive mains cable for the last 2 metres of the run from the breaker panel. Even though there are no vibration dampers under the racks where the switches sit, and the Ethernet cables are run in unshielded conduit that did not cost a fortune. Even though the Ethernet switch is a Nexus 93180YC-FX (it IS expensive enough, that's for certain, but its IEEE1588-2008 implementation does not suck) and not the Netgear with potting compound inside that was just marked up 6 times its original price but had stellar reviews (but it still is a P.O.S dumb Ethernet switch that will not understand IGMP...), and so on and so forth.

All those deemed-necessary things by the weasels selling shit to Phools who so desperately want to believe.  It makes me sick that these snake oil sales men are allowed to continue.

Even with that in play... there still isn't anything wrong with wanting to get a little closer to that original music-creation circuitry with what you do have control over. Remember, this is STILL a fucking HOBBY. We all do weird shit that doesn't make sense in the gestalt sense in pursuit of our hobby goals. 

It is a worthy goal. It can be attained (to some extent, of course). Most people are doing it completely wrong.

My short-list:

• Get your electro-mechanical transducers in order.
• Get your signal sources in order.

That is where the hard problems are. The world knows how to push a waveform through wire, and how to make it bigger. The only really hard problems, in playback (which, granted, is a rather constrained subset of the audio experience), are to some extent signal sources (less so if digital, but record players being a fully worthy rabbit colony and then some) and first and foremost: The speaker and how it interacts with the room.  Solve the speaker problem, and the rest of the system will sort itself out, if reasonably conservatively specified.

And we all delude ourselves over a great many things every day; each and every one of us builds a belief-system of one that helps us get through the night. It's when you expect OTHERS to join you in that delusion that you've done something wrong.

And remember, every dollar these fools spend on crap is a dollar that stimulates the economy, as opposed to the money that is taken out of circulation by an elitist few who feel they should have EVERYTHING. So which group is doing more harm than good, REALLY?

Yeah, all valid. Except that there are weasels (see above) who rip them off. I do not think dollars to weasels are the best way to lube the economy.

[Cerebus]

One thing Zucca needs to experience is my day today which is directly related to the above. It’s the hell known as “other people’s kids”. Something which no one tells you about when you get married.

There's a step worse, the in-law's out-law's kids. You can't even get away with scaring them off when no-one's watching, the little rodents go and rat on you to the sister-in-law. 

I've found the best defence to all kinds of rugrat is to learn to produce a convincing animal growl, something close to Rottweiler-that's-just-about-ready-for-lunch. 

Ever thought of getting the kids to like you because you lead them towards things that are socially acceptable and seemingly dangerous and onerous for the parents?

Parents feel they have to do the dirty work, whilst you remain the good guy.

I'd suggest flying glider, but rock climbing, scuba diving, horse riding are alternative 

That sounds more like a list of hobbies with a high kiddy attrition rate.

Anyway, who said the kids didn't like me? I was the uncle who used to buy them all Christmas presents that were chosen by a man who (1) actually remembered what it was like to be their age (any claims that I'm on my 3rd childhood are mildly exaggerated), and (2) wanted to annoy their parents as much as possible in exactly the same way as the kids did. I was egged on by my (then) wife and her sister, who did not have a high opinion of the women their brothers had married or the dull bores that their brothers had subsequently turned into.

As far as the kids were concerned I was the fun uncle, particularly as, at the time, I had access to the kind of fireworks you needed an explosives licence to purchase - kids love hearing the neighbours windowpanes rattle at firework time, the in-laws less so. If you saw an otherwise boring saloon company car driving up the M6 around Christmas with a <1.4G> explosives warning diamond stuck on the boot, that was probably me.

[mnementh]

...I do not think dollars to weasels are the best way to lube the economy.

I dunno... I think Dollars to Weasels!!! would be a great name for a thrash metal band... 

mnem
First album: " BUY THIS FUCKING RECORD THREE FUCKING TIMES EVEN IF YOU FUCKING HATE IT!!! "

[tggzzz]

One thing Zucca needs to experience is my day today which is directly related to the above. It’s the hell known as “other people’s kids”. Something which no one tells you about when you get married.

There's a step worse, the in-law's out-law's kids. You can't even get away with scaring them off when no-one's watching, the little rodents go and rat on you to the sister-in-law. 

I've found the best defence to all kinds of rugrat is to learn to produce a convincing animal growl, something close to Rottweiler-that's-just-about-ready-for-lunch. 

Ever thought of getting the kids to like you because you lead them towards things that are socially acceptable and seemingly dangerous and onerous for the parents?

Parents feel they have to do the dirty work, whilst you remain the good guy.

I'd suggest flying glider, but rock climbing, scuba diving, horse riding are alternative 

That sounds more like a list of hobbies with a high kiddy attrition rate.

Anyway, who said the kids didn't like me? I was the uncle who used to buy them all Christmas presents that were chosen by a man who (1) actually remembered what it was like to be their age (any claims that I'm on my 3rd childhood are mildly exaggerated), and (2) wanted to annoy their parents as much as possible in exactly the same way as the kids did. I was egged on by my (then) wife and her sister, who did not have a high opinion of the women their brothers had married or the dull bores that their brothers had subsequently turned into.

As far as the kids were concerned I was the fun uncle, particularly as, at the time, I had access to the kind of fireworks you needed an explosives licence to purchase - kids love hearing the neighbours windowpanes rattle at firework time, the in-laws less so. If you saw an otherwise boring saloon company car driving up the M6 around Christmas with a <1.4G> explosives warning diamond stuck on the boot, that was probably me.

Gliding no, dunno about the others.

Apart from that, I explained it badly. The concept is to encourage the parents to believe that they shouldn't inflict their little darlings on you.

[Saskia]

that's what our IT guys want to do. Teams, Onedrive and Azure. What a flabbergasting piece of amphibian ....

That combination adds up to only ONE THING that I can think of... "We want to make it someone else's problem. Please fire us all and put us out of our misery."

mnem
*casts a prayer to Ifni for Saskia's sanity*

Thanks for the prayer. They wanted to give me a friggin' Lenovo Yoga for my daily work. dafuq ?
How am I to train a fucking TF model out of 250 million segments for a major translation model on a Yoga ? Or on a terminal server ?
I pulled a Thinkstation out of the trash. Xeon e5-1650v3, 64 GB mem, Nvidia Quadro.
the dialog was like this:

-- Oh, you are supposed to do your dev stuff in our cloud !
Please tell me in single words that I can understand, how I hook up a JTAG programmer to the cloud !!!!
(do you m&/'*s know what a JTAG programmer is used for anyway )
-- oh, what is a JTAG programmer
you are telling me that I need to go with the times, be modern and use the cloud if you don't even know what a JTAG programmer is used for ? And you call that innovative ?
How am I supposed to be doing my PoC with that FPGA board if I can't program it because the gizmo needs to be hooked up to the programmer
-- uh ...
FUaGL ...

No, that was not nice .... buuuuuut.
Never gotten around to working with that FPGA though. And need to look at BERT and ELMO.

[Cerebus]

Yeah, all valid. Except that there are weasels (see above) who rip them off. I do not think dollars to weasels are the best way to lube the economy.

That's weaselly remedied, you should stoatally give your money to the stoats instead. (Thank you for playing straight man to one of my favourite dad-jokes.)

[Neomys Sapiens]

Now, if I took that booster, attached a main stage with a turbofan and airstart electronics, make the wings autoextend after launch and put in a GPS guidance system coupled with an altimeter and TFR this would indeed be a fascinating project.

I see you know where I was going with that 

Now back to that WPC-S pinball CPU on the bench where some jerk has tried to desolder the game ROM and ripped out the traces.

You haven't suffered properly if you did never rework teflon PCBs. The traces jump from it at the slightest nudge. 'WPC-S pinball CPU' sounds like DIL components to me.
If that is a recurring problem, you should be on the lookout for a PACE Cirkit  or equivalent. Don't go for the chinese stuff, it's crap. Then follow TB43-0127 and all is fine.

No .408ct for me.

A pity. As a collector I would have pestered to drop me a specimen. Same for the .458 of course. But you or I might at least pass through the other's area. And quite a collection it is - from Lefaucheux to caseless. Including some experimentals and other stuff where the publications show a white space.

[Neomys Sapiens]

Same here, Current probe or new tube on a .223, current probe won and now I have sights on another ! 

Sounds like a win for the possums!

[Neomys Sapiens]

Okay, I dug out the 338LM, just for good measure sort of speak.  ...

NICE! I always held valid the saying that bigger problems should be solved from farther away.

[Saskia]

Now, if I took that booster, attached a main stage with a turbofan and airstart electronics, make the wings autoextend after launch and put in a GPS guidance system coupled with an altimeter and TFR this would indeed be a fascinating project.

I see you know where I was going with that 

Now back to that WPC-S pinball CPU on the bench where some jerk has tried to desolder the game ROM and ripped out the traces.

You haven't suffered properly if you did never rework teflon PCBs. The traces jump from it at the slightest nudge. 'WPC-S pinball CPU' sounds like DIL components to me.
If that is a recurring problem, you should be on the lookout for a PACE Cirkit  or equivalent. Don't go for the chinese stuff, it's crap. Then follow TB43-0127 and all is fine.

No .408ct for me.

A pity. As a collector I would have pestered to drop me a specimen. Same for the .458 of course. But you or I might at least pass through the other's area. And quite a collection it is - from Lefaucheux to caseless. Including some experimentals and other stuff where the publications show a white space.

Interesting. My hubby would probably like that. Where are you located (PM ?)

Trace repair: we do it in the lab of a friend of mine somewhere near Frankfurt.
The CPU board was corroded, when desoldering, a couple of eyelets came off. Bummer.
Oh well, back to the glueing board.

[worsthorse]

A sad day at the test bench. I had a couple of hours to work on the 184, the one that I manage to hose last week. And hose it I did. It appears that I damaged the proprietary delay line, which makes the 184 a whole lot less useful.   

I stepped away from the bench once I isolated the problem to that section; otherwise, I am likely to do something stupid at this point.  I also found a couple of transistors, which feed the delay line, are damaged, too.

Tomorrow, I guess, I will partially disassemble the box and see if I can isolate the delay line and test it.   It is too bad because I also figured out, along the way, the signal distortion issue, and know how to fix it.

[med6753]

A sad day at the test bench. I had a couple of hours to work on the 184, the one that I manage to hose last week. And hose it I did. It appears that I damaged the proprietary delay line, which makes the 184 a whole lot less useful.   

I stepped away from the bench once I isolated the problem to that section; otherwise, I am likely to do something stupid at this point.  I also found a couple of transistors, which feed the delay line, are damaged, too.

Tomorrow, I guess, I will partially disassemble the box and see if I can isolate the delay line and test it.   It is too bad because I also figured out, along the way, the signal distortion issue, and know how to fix it.

How could the delay line get damaged? Isn't simply a length of coax like used in most scopes? Or is it more complex than that? I don't have a schematic to see what it's made of so I could be talking out my arse. 

[worsthorse]

I dunno med. It looks weird to me, too. I tracked it down to there from both directions. I am going to assume that I am doing something dumb and look at it again tomorrow.

I don't know if it matters but this section of the circuit has been reworked before and I haven't figured out quite what was done or why. I also found a place where a diode was subbed for a biasing resistor. There are crappy solder joints, left behind flux, and some wiring that isn't in the service manual photos.  Whoever did the work tried to do it all from the top side of the board (to avoid removing it) and made a mess of it.

To be honest, I can't figure out what the delay line is actually supposed to do but my brain isn't working well enough right now to puzzle it out.

[Specmaster]

Best way to piss off an audiophool.

Best hifi I have ever owned:

Yeah, great sound, when matched up with another Apple product, but only because Apple heavily process their sounds to extract what they think is the best sound that they can get from something small. The same can be said for Bose gear as well, take away all of that processing and they would sound like shit. Real true Hi-Fi relies on just pure high quality sound all the way through the system with as little "colouring" of the original as is possible. This does not have involve spending mega bucks either chasing 100% perfection like these audiophools do, getting to around 90-95% is good enough as most people are incapable of hearing the difference anyway. Getting to around 90-95% can achieved for around sub £500 if you know what you're doing.

[tautech]

Same here, Current probe or new tube on a .223, current probe won and now I have sights on another ! 

Sounds like a win for the possums!

Nope, my .22 Anschutz deals nicely to these vermin's from Beanland (OZ).
.223 would be a waste of $ for that use and as they're mainly 'tree-bears' shooting skyward would be just plain reckless with a centerfire. 

[Carl_Smith]

Yeah, all valid. Except that there are weasels (see above) who rip them off. I do not think dollars to weasels are the best way to lube the economy.

That's weaselly remedied, you should stoatally give your money to the stoats instead. (Thank you for playing straight man to one of my favourite dad-jokes.)

Looney Tunes is the only reason I know what a stoat is.  From the one where Bugs is reading the encyclopedia entry for "Tasmanian Devil" to see what he eats.  "...stoats, goats, shoats..."   I was a nerdy enough kid to go look up what stoats and shoats were...

[beanflying]

Getting close to Christmas so the white stuff is getting out again on a 31 degree day Chilled Bean plenty of fat and I just don't care....

[Neomys Sapiens]

The next thing I'll do TEA-wise is giving the HP6114A a short lookover and abbreviated test - owing this to ERO-SHAN. As it was selected by him (and even scrubbed) I have high hopes for a functional instrument.

After that, a potential problem patient did come in and was bumped ahead of the HP6825A in the repair queue. A Tektronix PG502 (250MHz pulse generator for the TM500 system), which is very near the top of my 'items to get' list, as I need a faster PG and don't have much space.

I can't complain whatever the outcome, for 25.- it was a fair price even if it ends up as a empty module frame and handful of spares, and it was sold as not working. But I have to try because of the abovementioned need for one. The pictures suggested that it was mechanical damage to the controls mainly, which made me look forward to it. Now I have discovered that both fuses are gone, so there is more to it. Seals are still on, so hopefully I will not encounter any great ape actions.
While I have the original Tek extender, I now have to figure out a way to test it without endangering my mainframes.
 

[Kosmic]

Received my Ender 3 from amazon today. Impressive that you just need about an hour to build then you spend some time leveling the bed and off you go.

i'm already printing something 



P.S: Yes it's pink filament, don't ask. The only way to make all this happen was to involve the kids 

[Neomys Sapiens]

Getting close to Christmas so the white stuff is getting out again on a 31 degree day Chilled Bean plenty of fat and I just don't care....

As you put that, it could be an excuse for anything...

[Kosmic]

The next thing I'll do TEA-wise is giving the HP6114A a short lookover and abbreviated test - owing this to ERO-SHAN. As it was selected by him (and even scrubbed) I have high hopes for a functional instrument.

After that, a potential problem patient did come in and was bumped ahead of the HP6825A in the repair queue. A Tektronix PG502 (250MHz pulse generator for the TM500 system), which is very near the top of my 'items to get' list, as I need a faster PG and don't have much space.

I can't complain whatever the outcome, for 25.- it was a fair price even if it ends up as a empty module frame and handful of spares, and it was sold as not working. But I have to try because of the abovementioned need for one. The pictures suggested that it was mechanical damage to the controls mainly, which made me look forward to it. Now I have discovered that both fuses are gone, so there is more to it. Seals are still on, so hopefully I will not encounter any great ape actions.
While I have the original Tek extender, I now have to figure out a way to test it without endangering my mainframes.

250Mhz pulse is pretty cool. I hope you will be able to fix it.

[beanflying]

Getting close to Christmas so the white stuff is getting out again on a 31 degree day Chilled Bean plenty of fat and I just don't care....

As you put that, it could be an excuse for anything...

By 'anything' you mean 'snow' right