Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[AVGresponding]

FFS ... 
https://www.ebay.de/itm/Goldener-Commodore-C64-Jubilaumsmodell-1986-einmillionster-C64-in-Deutschland/143998258361?hash=item2186f70cb9:g:lvwAAOSwfrNgadV3

 

[xrunner]

• E3611A power supply wrap-up
  
  I obtained a new 0.1 ohm resistor and performed the calibration sequence shown in the attachment. So this project is buttoned-up (literally, because the case design uses no screws).
  
  
• Keeping the streak going ... yet another TEA item ordered as of yesterday. It's an hp 437B power meter.
  
  eBay auction: #114616655678
  
  The seller seems to have a stack of them. The price is only $37.50 fully tested. It's the same group I got these two latest hp units from, so I trust the seller now.
  
  But, of course, that does not include the sensor cable (hp 11730A), or a sensor available wherever you can find them. I'd probably go with the 8481A: -30 to +20 dBm, 10 MHz to 18 GHz. Also need attenuators if you want to measure over +20 dBm, but I have those on-hand. Most I would measure would be ~ +50 dBm.
  
  So, it remains to be seen, not if, but how badly I will get reamed over those two necessary items. I know they are wanting $79 just for a used cable.
  
  For the sensor ... ouch. 

[DC1MC]

Just in case you have some cash left after that Comodore64  and want some of these analogue boards, here are the last "anti-hoarding" links:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/High-Precision-10-V-Reference-Analog-Devices-AD587JN-AD7535JN-5x-OP177/154410695222

https://www.ebay.de/itm/High-Precision-10-V-Reference-Analog-Devices-AD587JN-AD7535JN-5x-OP07CJ/154410692288

https://www.ebay.de/itm/High-Precision-10-V-Reference-Burr-Brown-REF102AP-AD7535JN-5x-OP177/154410705574

The one who receives it first should creat a topic about "dissecting" and reversing the devices, I will gladly participate, congrats to Ulrich (no connection with the seller) and that was it.

 Cheers,
 DC1MC

[AVGresponding]

One fpr the Panaplex fanboys
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265108940736
The display is a standard digital panel meter

With any luck it will require 110V AC to run, quite a few bare panel meters of that type but they are all in the US.

Another one with dual display that has been on my watch list all week, I have no intension of bidding by the way.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/114756914757


David

Luckily I have no use for either of those or I'd be busy figuring out which floor joist still has spare capacity. I suspect bd139 won't be buying the dual display item even if he really needs it...   


Buying this would likely put you at a good chance of joining Med in the hernia club:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Keithley-707A-Switching-Matrix-Mainframe-w-2-x-7072-Semiconductor-Matrix-Cards/373534157886

[Saskia]

nah, wasn't me who bought the C64. I'm building my C65 (out of a Nexys FPGA board), but that is a different matter ...

Also, I have to preserve my money. I just got a quote for my yacht training (reasonably expensive, 30 hours for 900 Pesos ...) and will be saving my funds for a Pogo 850 or equivalent (can't afford a new one ...). Would prefer the Pogo 36, but mooolah problems are keeping me.

[factory]

My recently acquired TEA items. By the readings I wonder if these were made in the same factory at all? 

Any chance you bought the Y7651 on ebay-kleinanzeigen? Because it's got modified jacks on front, very unusual. In any case you might want to get nice binding posts like shown below to upgrade from ikea cable to proper shorting bar, like on original unit. VERY nice stack otherwise
Edit: Any chance to have a non destructive peek inside the data card? I would also immensly appreciate a detail shot of it's connector.
I posted a proposed pinout over on the Metrology section, it might help the investigation along.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/metrology/yokogawa-7651-programmable-dc-source/

Yes, I bought it from eBay. Maybe it is some safety related modification, there is also yellow exclamation mark sticker added. I will get some jumper plugs, not worth to (un)modify it any further.
(Attachment Link)
The card is 512kB version (378905) that came with 7552. I do have an 8kB card on order.

Card is very difficult to open without ruining it so not gonna even try

Thanks for the picture of the connection. Please do tell when you get the 8kb card, I might ask for some comperative resistance checks on them.

Is a Yokogawa 64 KB karten any use?
https://www.ebay.de/itm/402742260853

Think they need to amend their postage option if they don't want to send to England as the description states.

David

[Specmaster]

Well, lockdown is partially over, so today saw the long awaited return of the Russian Spitfire that has been sitting in crates at the back of the hangar for over 20 years, all mangled etc since it was dug out of the ground where it crashed many years ago. After many years and millions of £ later, the owner has managed to realise his dream, and it now joins his other prized planes, a Red Tails Mustang and A rare PR Spitfire, both of which are, like this one, as original and authentic as it is possible to get, and not replicas. All still retain their original engines.

My son and I were invited over to the airfield today to see this magnificent plane fly back from Biggin Hill where it was fully reassembled, tested and received full certification to fly  It has replica cannons fitted, complete with all the internal works and magazines etc fitted with dummy bullets, it is that complete.

Because we were invited by the owner, we were also privileged as we so often are with this owner / operator to have access to his hangar and get hands on with the planes, so we did not have to stand at the far end of the taxiway where the crowds were but were waiting for him at his hangar and also helped to put this graceful lady of the sky to bed in his hangar and then had an exclusive guided tour of her behind closed doors.

[Cubdriver]

Well, lockdown is partially over, so today saw the long awaited return of the Russian Spitfire that has been sitting in crates at the back of the hangar for over 20 years, all mangled etc since it was dug out of the ground where it crashed many years ago. After many years and millions of £ later, the owner has managed to realise his dream, and it now joins his other prized planes, a Red Tails Mustang and A rare PR Spitfire, both of which are, like this one, as original and authentic as it is possible to get, and not replicas. All still retain their original engines.

My son and I were invited over to the airfield today to see this magnificent plane fly back from Biggin Hill where it was fully reassembled, tested and received full certification to fly  It has replica cannons fitted, complete with all the internal works and magazines etc fitted with dummy bullets, it is that complete.

Because we were invited by the owner, we were also privileged as we so often are with this owner / operator to have access to his hangar and get hands on with the planes, so we did not have to stand at the far end of the taxiway where the crowds were but were waiting for him at his hangar and also helped to put this graceful lady of the sky to bed in his hangar and then had an exclusive guided tour of her behind closed doors.

The Spit is a truly gorgeous flying machine.  Never quite appreciated how much so until I saw one in the flesh at an air museum in CA back in the early 90s - pictures in books never did it justice.  Sounds like a great day for you, Spec.

-Pat

[bd139]

Woohoo finally got my hands on a cheap new thinkpad. Only a Ryzen T495 but it will do for what I need. Now to see if I can expense the bastard and kick this fucking dell back to the Cthulhu lair it came from. 

[Saskia]

congrats.

Revised my backup strategy for @home.

Synology NAS (8 bay), 2 Volumes (small one for my audio streaming, large one for the rest) backing up to a dedicated huge single drive, plus also has a hot spare configured for the important stuff...
further backup to USB connected huge drive which is being brought over to my other flat 500 km away and will be mirrored to another NAS ...

may sound like overkill, however I hope that my data is reasonably safe.

[Cerebus]

More of the OCXO saga, for those following along at home.

Warm up curve for one sample oscillator. Caveats: Temperature measured with an uncalibrated 10k NTC thermistor taped to the top of the can while it lies bottom up, dead bug fashion, like this:



As you can see, not truly representative of in-circuit performance the right way up on a board that would probably have enough copper to conduct some heat away. So, indicative only, your mileage might vary significantly.

The chart:

[Specmaster]

@Cubdriver, yes it was a great day out for us, we very often get invited in to the hangar for tea and a biscuit. We also get to help put away his planes when he has been out to a display with them. He always keeps his hangar doors closed as he does not like his privacy being invaded. When he rolls out a plane to prepare for a show, the other visitors to the airfield will often pose in front of his plane, or take photos of their car parked in front of it etc, with many of the touching it as well and often they get asked politely to go away.

My son and I respect his privacy and don't go poking our cameras into his private space, yes we photograph him and his plane when out on the airfield or at a show, but his hangar is like his home and treat it as such. He respects that and has told us not to be a stranger when at the airfield, if he is there, and his doors are closed, we are to knock on the door, and he'll let us in, offer us tea and a biscuit as long as what we discuss does not go any further than between the three of us, and we don't take any photos in his hangar.

The airfield is home to all kinds of plane collections, and we get on with most of the operators because we respect them and never obstruct them in their duties, and they will often come and talk to us or give us a heads-up when something exciting is going to happen like a new arrival coming etc. There is a Folland Gnat display team there, a Huey, Mig, Jaguar (being restored), Jet Provosts, L29 Delfin, Harvards and many historic planes and helicopters  stashed away in the hangars. So a visit to our local airfield could yield any of these for photographic opportunities on our visits there.

[mnementh]

Gorgeous bird, Spec; thanks for sharing. 

I've been outside all afternoon doing the usual spring cleaning of a BBQ I curb-scored last fall. 'tis the season.

It's turned out to be a bit of a blister for the lack of 3 little orifices needed to convert it from NG back to LP; these are standard 5/16-32 hex spuds that used to be a thing you could get at any hardware store. Now the only place I could find them was online, and the only place that showed them in stock was BBQ Parts Canada... which for some reason is only shipping from the US...? So no ordering for curbside pickup... 

   

Ah well... correct spuds ordered, along with a few other bits... and I spent aboot a hour making the original spuds so I could drill them out to the correct size & use the grill until they get here. We'll see if that works tomorrow.    The things a man will do for a grilled steak... 

Time to go get some well-earned rest...

mnem

          To sleep... perchance to dream...

[Robert763]

Well, lockdown is partially over, so today saw the long awaited return of the Russian Spitfire that has been sitting in crates at the back of the hangar for over 20 years, all mangled etc since it was dug out of the ground where it crashed many years ago. After many years and millions of £ later, the owner has managed to realise his dream, and it now joins his other prized planes, a Red Tails Mustang and A rare PR Spitfire, both of which are, like this one, as original and authentic as it is possible to get, and not replicas. All still retain their original engines.

My son and I were invited over to the airfield today to see this magnificent plane fly back from Biggin Hill where it was fully reassembled, tested and received full certification to fly  It has replica cannons fitted, complete with all the internal works and magazines etc fitted with dummy bullets, it is that complete.

Because we were invited by the owner, we were also privileged as we so often are with this owner / operator to have access to his hangar and get hands on with the planes, so we did not have to stand at the far end of the taxiway where the crowds were but were waiting for him at his hangar and also helped to put this graceful lady of the sky to bed in his hangar and then had an exclusive guided tour of her behind closed doors.

Looks like a nice aircraft.  I used to do a fair bit of work on various warbirds including the Charles Church aircraft. Not so much recently but did do some design work for the BBMF a couple of years ago. It's difficult to get radios that don't look completley out of place. We used to fit the Becker 2000 series. At least they didn't have LED or Panaplex displays. Now the best you can do is the little 2 or 3" round instrumwnt style units and tuck them away.

[McBryce]

Just in case you have some cash left after that Comodore64  and want some of these analogue boards, here are the last "anti-hoarding" links:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/High-Precision-10-V-Reference-Analog-Devices-AD587JN-AD7535JN-5x-OP177/154410695222

https://www.ebay.de/itm/High-Precision-10-V-Reference-Analog-Devices-AD587JN-AD7535JN-5x-OP07CJ/154410692288

https://www.ebay.de/itm/High-Precision-10-V-Reference-Burr-Brown-REF102AP-AD7535JN-5x-OP177/154410705574

The one who receives it first should creat a topic about "dissecting" and reversing the devices, I will gladly participate, congrats to Ulrich (no connection with the seller) and that was it.

 Cheers,
 DC1MC

Mine should arrive on Wednesday and I intend doing a complete reverse Eng. of the circuit to see if it could be useful in its original state (as soon as I've finished respraying my new 1 Millionth C64 ).

Regarding the C64, They've gone for higher prices in the past, but (A) It's known that there were many of these in circulation, not just one or two as the seller tries to suggest and (B) there were copies made later by others that are impossible to distinguish from the originals.

McBryce.

[Brumby]

mnem

Oh, OK then.

...helping infect you with time-nuttery was the delicious frosting on that cupcake.

Bitch

[capt bullshot]

Arrgh! Windows, character encodings and German "Umlaute" suck big time.

I have some scripts that automate report generation (running on Windows). They need a number of parameters as input, as per example "The Name Of The Project".
For some reason, they create a temporary ".bat" file and call this by calling cmd with the temporary ".bat" as a parameter.

Now some user (me) created a new project a few months ago. Last week some user (me) tried to run the reports first time over this new project - failed. So I dug into these old scripts (created some 9 years age by some smartass C# and MS CMD script kiddie (me)) and tested the temporary ".bat" by copy / paste into an already open "cmd" - works. Executing the very same ".bat" from that very same "cmd" - no luck. Alas, the report generator software gives just a very helpful message, something like: "Object reference not assigned to an object instance".

So WTF is wrong here?

Turns out, some dumbass windows user (me) used the word "für" within the "The name of the Project" string. Works fine everywhere, except as a parameter within a ".bat" or ".cmd". Changed that offending word to "fuer" fixed the problem. Just a reminder for "never use anything else than 7bit ASCII for important stuff" to myself.

Microsoft, character encoding comitees and vendor of this particular piece of proprietary software, please refund three days of wasted time hunting that issue ...

[Ice-Tea]

Solution: stop being German. 

[THDplusN_bad]

Mine should arrive on Wednesday and I intend doing a complete reverse Eng. of the circuit to see if it could be useful in its original state (as soon as I've finished respraying my new 1 Millionth C64 ).

Regarding the C64, They've gone for higher prices in the past, but (A) It's known that there were many of these in circulation, not just one or two as the seller tries to suggest and (B) there were copies made later by others that are impossible to distinguish from the originals.

McBryce.

This thing in a crappy condition was really sold for EUR 6.450? I know, I know, it's a free market, but that's insane...

But on a 2nd thought: This helps me as justification when I will be buying my next over-priced piece of used T&M equipment. If I ever needed one

[jxjbsd]

I received a TEK1503 cable tester today. It uses the same CRT and TEK326. Therefore, I plan to use it to repair the damaged CRT 326. However, after receiving it, I found that this 1503 is very new and very beautiful, so what should I do?

[med6753]

Today's deliveries......

Two spare 7586 nuvistors via USPS.

Re-cap BOM for the Type 422 PSU via UPS.

[McBryce]

Mine should arrive on Wednesday and I intend doing a complete reverse Eng. of the circuit to see if it could be useful in its original state (as soon as I've finished respraying my new 1 Millionth C64 ).

Regarding the C64, They've gone for higher prices in the past, but (A) It's known that there were many of these in circulation, not just one or two as the seller tries to suggest and (B) there were copies made later by others that are impossible to distinguish from the originals.

McBryce.

This thing in a crappy condition was really sold for EUR 6.450? I know, I know, it's a free market, but that's insane...

But on a 2nd thought: This helps me as justification when I will be buying my next over-priced piece of used T&M equipment. If I ever needed one

When test equipment sellers start mentioning "Low Serial number" or "for collectors" you'll know it's time to find a new hobby.

McBryce.

[tggzzz]

I received a TEK1503 cable tester today. It uses the same CRT and TEK326. Therefore, I plan to use it to repair the damaged CRT 326. However, after receiving it, I found that this 1503 is very new and very beautiful, so what should I do?

Does it work? Do you have working batteries?

If it is like the 1502, it will not work without batteries. "Battery fakers" are unreliable in my experience.

The quickest way to determine if a 1502 works is to connect a bench PSU +12V/1.5A to the battery terminals visible under the "danger 165V" label in your 4.jpg. 4mm banana sockets are the right size; make sure you get them the right way round.

If it works, you have a more difficult decision.

[tggzzz]

When test equipment sellers start mentioning "Low Serial number" or "for collectors" you'll know it's time to find a new hobby.

... and look through your attic/cellar for unrecognised treasures.

[mansaxel]

When test equipment sellers start mentioning "Low Serial number" or "for collectors" you'll know it's time to find a new hobby.

Good call.  However; I'm in this because (I want to) need the capabilities of the instruments I'm piling up. I want the instruments to live an extended useful life, as if they were in their natural habitat, albeit an environment where caring for investments and learning through maintenance is valued.  The Venn diagram between corporate activities and this my dream is not exactly Yin/Yang close.

As a consequence function always trumps mint-condition-ness. OTOH, I never change something just because.