Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[25 CPS]

And another test.



And a question about the product line that's sitting on the cutting board.  No 13C is obvious because of the whole number 13 superstition thing but did it ever come out why HP skipped over the 14C when they made that line of calculators in the 80s?

The 15C second from the bottom is my daily driver.

NICE. I need to get another family photo together...I have acquired a couple more since the last one. 

I gotta say though, the 15C and the 16C are pretty much my favorite pairing. I actually have two of each, normally one pair would live at the office.

Thanks!  I started out with the 15C and 16C which are my two most frequently used, but saw an 11C available locally a nice walk from work for a totally reasonable price so I picked it up along with a 12C since those are more than plentiful.  That's when I decided to make a point of getting a 10C since I had the complete series otherwise but that took a while and even though it was pretty reasonably priced, it was more expensive than a few of the others since the runt of the litter is kind of rare and collectable.

I have a second 15C at work and I'd like to pick up a second 16C to go with it too, or maybe the Swiss Micros counterpart.

[mnementh]

oh, you just found an eddie in the space time continuum. Maybe a gravitational shockwave has disturbed the entropy and triggered a subspace quantum singularity.

Eddie...? In the space-time continuum...? Not again... 

Dammitt... when he gets in there, costs at least three physicists and a superpositioned cat to get him out... and he's always sticky. 

mnem
Fine, fine... I'll go fire up the quantum-tunneling laser drill...

[mnementh]

   https://www.amazon.com/Micsig-DP10013-Differential-Attenuation-Tektronix/dp/B074K4XPW3/

Hey guys... just tripped over this while looking for some 10x probes for my 54645A. Seems entirely too good a deal at ~USD$165-168, given the 3.5ns rise time and 1.3KV rating. I have much higher priorities ATM so not really looking at them, but was just curious if these were like known to be crap, or really that good a deal?

mnem
 

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001228383330.html

Yeah, I know they're on AliEx. Amazon has them in stock, and cheaper, with same-day delivery! 

mnem
 

[bd139]

6294a arrived. Looks good so far.

Firstly I got the shit scared out of me. It arrived in a wet cornered box wrapped in plastic. The wet turned out to be diesel or something similarly nasty based on the smell. Has been disposed of outside as has all packaging.



Fortunately the power supply was perfectly fine inside it  . And it's in reasonable condition



Need to get rid of this horrid thing off it first



Insides. Date coded around 1989 so this is a VERY late example. This product line ran from 1968 to 1990 approximately which is a hell of a long time.

Tidy up and test later.

Edit: oh win, just seen the voltage pot is a 10 turn one.

[McBryce]

oh, you just found an eddie in the space time continuum. Maybe a gravitational shockwave has disturbed the entropy and triggered a subspace quantum singularity.

Eddie...? In the space-time continuum...? Not again... 

Dammitt... when he gets in there, costs at least three physicists and a superpositioned cat to get him out... and he's always sticky. 

mnem
Fine, fine... I'll go fire up the quantum-tunneling laser drill...

Nothing compared to the mess that this Eddie would cause...

McBryce

[mnementh]

Oh, mum loved Eddie Izzard... when I was a teen, we'd get totally baked and just listen to him talk. 

mnem
 

[tonyalbus]

   https://www.amazon.com/Micsig-DP10013-Differential-Attenuation-Tektronix/dp/B074K4XPW3/

Hey guys... just tripped over this while looking for some 10x probes for my 54645A. Seems entirely too good a deal at ~USD$165-168, given the 3.5ns rise time and 1.3KV rating. I have much higher priorities ATM so not really looking at them, but was just curious if these were like known to be crap, or really that good a deal?

mnem
 

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001228383330.html

Yeah, I know they're on AliEx. Amazon has them in stock, and cheaper, with same-day delivery! 

mnem
 

ah okey... for me Ali was cheaper thats why, i thought i let you know....

[med6753]

Geez, I go take a long drive in the Civic over Mohonk Mountain and this thread is off the rails again. 

My destination? A very special Walmart in a small town. And why is it special? It's clean and neat. It's well stocked. Adequate open check outs. And most of all, not crowded and full of weirdos. Too bad it's over 40 minutes away. But at least the drive is traffic free. 

Edit: And here it is.....1115 hours and UPS just pulled into the complex. Right on time. But nothing for me today.

[Cerebus]

I really don't get the microservices approach. They chop everything up, put the tiniest feature they can find in its own service. Then, end up in a clusterfuck of interdependency. Also, a nightmare to update. Version control is probably not done correctly so they loose track of which version of service A works with that version of service B. To solve that they decided to be backward compatible and completely underestimate the challenge. The whole thing become instable full of bugs and impossible to manage.

I understand the idea. And it’s a bad one. Add containers and it gets worse as we lose any hope of capturing any system state evaporates at the first problem. It creates soft dependencies at runtime instead of compile time, increases latency, makes collaborator tracing difficult, makes debugging difficult, makes versioning and contracts difficult, makes training and operations difficult.

What’s the point? Unless you’re stupid scale it’s a stupid idea. I watched someone build a microservice that was called six times and decommissioned.

A big chunk of my job is letting people know we don’t have google scale problems. If we write out shit properly it’d probably run on a single mid range DL380...

Yeah, it turns:

Code: [Select]

#import "LiveExchangeRateLibrary.h"

...
    exchangeRate = GetLiveExchangeRate ("GBP", "rates.serviceprovider.com", "AccessKey-big-hash");
...

into all the configuration to structure a container running the exchange rate fetcher (which is probably layered on other containers running a cache and a key-value store), organize kubernetes and your SDN to plumb it all, and you still need a library to make the call out. As you implicitly say, if you're running at massive scale it might make sense, but how often in real businesses is scaling going to justify the complexity versus 'get a faster computer'.

[BU508A]

Geez, I go take a long drive in the Civic over Mohonk Mountain and this thread is off the rails again. 

My destination? A very special Walmart in a small town. And why is it special? It's clean and neat. It's well stocked. Adequate open check outs. And most of all, not crowded and full of weirdos. Too bad it's over 40 minutes away. But at least the drive is traffic free. 

Edit: And here it is.....1115 hours and UPS just pulled into the complex. Right on time. But nothing for me today.

Why? Our good boy bd139 has posted something TEA ontopic?      

[med6753]

Geez, I go take a long drive in the Civic over Mohonk Mountain and this thread is off the rails again. 

My destination? A very special Walmart in a small town. And why is it special? It's clean and neat. It's well stocked. Adequate open check outs. And most of all, not crowded and full of weirdos. Too bad it's over 40 minutes away. But at least the drive is traffic free. 

Edit: And here it is.....1115 hours and UPS just pulled into the complex. Right on time. But nothing for me today.

Why? Our good boy bd139 has posted something TEA ontopic?      

Yep, I just saw that. He got an HP power supply dipped in diesel fuel. 

[Cerebus]

Just got a new motor coupling delivered from China.



You've got the love the way all the burrs have been carefully anodized! 

[Specmaster]

Oh, mum loved Eddie Izzard... when I was a teen, we'd get totally baked and just listen to him talk. 

mnem
 

Thats OK, we won't hold it against you, it takes all kinds of folks to make a world 

[Specmaster]

Just got a new motor coupling delivered from China.



You've got the love the way all the burrs have been carefully anodized! 

Now that is what you call attention to detail right there.

[Specmaster]

Amazon are really bathing themselves in glory today I must say. I tried unsuccessfully to speak to a customer service agent at Amazon by clicking call me now and providing them with my phone number, slight pause, then message appears on screen, "placing call", a few seconds later "call cancelled" appears 

Contacted the seller in Cambridge who promptly replied via email stating that they cannot tell where the camera is as  it was Amazons own transport that collected it from them at 3:01pm yesterday. They kindly gave me a direct number for Amazon customer support. Call the number, get a short message that they are using SMS as a faster way of dealing with things, press 1, and we will send the link to your phone. I press 1 and I get.... a link to their on-line support which is where I started my journey  :rant:All I wanted to do is to drive to the local distribution depot and collect it rather than wait another 3 to 7 days, it is only 15 miles from FFS. 

 So I'm no further forward now than I was this morning and for this they charge annual fee of £79 

[mansaxel]

6294a arrived. Looks good so far.

<snip>

Edit: oh win, just seen the voltage pot is a 10 turn one.

Option 09 as the 10-turn was known became standard towards the end of the run, at least on the 6209b, or so the manual tells me.

And of course; as soon as I'd found and ordered some fitting switches for mine on Amazon I stumble on the right surplus site which has got much more of them, better looking, NOS, NSN, UL, CSA, and so on. 

[Specmaster]

6294a arrived. Looks good so far.

<snip>

Edit: oh win, just seen the voltage pot is a 10 turn one.

Option 09 as the 10-turn was known became standard towards the end of the run, at least on the 6209b, or so the manual tells me.

And of course; as soon as I'd found and ordered some fitting switches for mine on Amazon I stumble on the right surplus site which has got much more of them, better looking, NOS, NSN, UL, CSA, and so on. 

Thats Murphy for you, always gets his oar one way or other, bastard.

[Specmaster]

I'll just leave this here and see what reaction it gets, I think its disgraceful.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000n1xp/panorama-test-and-trace-exposed

[mnementh]

Amazon are really bathing themselves in glory today I must say. I tried unsuccessfully to speak to a customer service agent at Amazon by clicking call me now and providing them with my phone number, slight pause, then message appears on screen, "placing call", a few seconds later "call cancelled" appears 

Contacted the seller in Cambridge who promptly replied via email stating that they cannot tell where the camera is as  it was Amazons own transport that collected it from them at 3:01pm yesterday. They kindly gave me a direct number for Amazon customer support. Call the number, get a short message that they are using SMS as a faster way of dealing with things, press 1, and we will send the link to your phone. I press 1 and I get.... a link to their on-line support which is where I started my journey  :rant:All I wanted to do is to drive to the local distribution depot and collect it rather than wait another 3 to 7 days, it is only 15 miles from FFS. 

 So I'm no further forward now than I was this morning and for this they charge annual fee of £79 

Yeah, and I just ordered some CPAP bits and elephant bog roll... when I checked out, the CPAP bits were SUPPOSED to be same-day today. Now everything's going to be Saturday.  Assholez.

I could volunteer for the same circle-jerk you just went through... but you know what? fukkit. They still deliver more reliably than FEDUPS or CanPost.

mnem
*punt*

[bd139]

Thats Murphy for you, always gets his oar one way or other, bastard.

Talking of Murphy .... that ain't a capacitor any more 

[med6753]

Working on the Type 310A vertical range issue with 50mV and after considerable head scratching I figured it out and it was slapping me in the face but I didn't realize it. 

If you follow the first schematic only the 50mV ranges and below get fed into V320 and V329. That should have been the clue. There's a pot R322 called Pre-amp gain on the 2nd schematic. Yep, it was way off. I mentioned previously that I found no sign of any Gorilla activity in this scope. But there sure has been some monkey shines. That monkey was loose in here twisting pots. And in addition I noticed in my travels that the sweep cal is off too. More monkey shines I'm sure.

So I have to completely re-calibrate the vertical section first before doing any compensation. I'm going to use the FeelTech function generator to accurately set the p-p levels across the entire vertical attenuator. Then use it to calibrate the sweep. Then go back with the Heath IG-4244 Scope Calibrator for the compensation.

Who knows what else that damn monkey was up to. 


   

[med6753]

Thats Murphy for you, always gets his oar one way or other, bastard.

Talking of Murphy .... that ain't a capacitor any more 

FUBAR. 

[mnementh]

I'll just leave this here and see what reaction it gets, I think its disgraceful.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000n1xp/panorama-test-and-trace-exposed

Well, the link you posted to requires an account with BBC, so I looked it up elsewhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54284095

This entire program is nothing more than a brain-dead-talking-head answer to a real problem which requires thought. Right there you have eliminated 98% of the people in positions of power from the equation; the 2% with a brain are still arguing with those other 98% over getting ventilators to people who are dying without them. 

And of course, there's no money for ventilators because this (and dozens of other similarly brain-dead but high publicity band-aid solutions) shitshow they slapped together via cost-plus private contractors sucked every penny of every emergency fund dry. 

mnem
In other words, Business as Usual.

[Specmaster]

Thats Murphy for you, always gets his oar one way or other, bastard.

Talking of Murphy .... that ain't a capacitor any more 

Yes it is, just freaking small one  That isn't going to be a cheap fix

[bd139]

31 quid from Mouser 

I'm not substituting it for the same part. Too much cash.