Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Vince]

Unfortunately also the thread where helpful member oldway crossed swords with Simon and despite it being a private slanging match oldway is with us no more. 

Oh yeah I remember IOldway... what a jerk he was when he posted on that 2215 topic to complain about my long posts. I wish him a long and painful death.

That's very uncharitable Vince to a guy that was only trying to help and help he could as his experience was significant.
His only issue was your excellent rambling writeups were hard work for him as English was not his mother tongue and out of frustration he criticized your ramblings then Simon got involved back at a time when he had a hair trigger for the Ban button.
Oldway and I had conversations after he was banned so I know how it all panned out from his side and if nothing else it confirmed how difficult it can be on a truly international forum like EEVblog.

I am still waiting for the replacement brass collet you said you would turn on a lathe with your friend Dubbie, to fix the broken one on the time base know ! Kiwis are all show and no go, promise just promises !

I haven't seen Dubbie for a bit other than know he was getting on with making a family and at last count he was up to 3 and for sure once what was 'his time' is no more ..... ankle biters and all that.

Been 4 years now so I gave up on it   

Ok I don't know how far Dubbie got with the bits I gave him to make the collet and other than not having a something/32" die I probably could've made it but it seems it's no longer required.
No worries, I might see Dubbie briefly at EMEX next week and tell him to ditch that project. 

Sorry if I am not charitable with someone who posted what he posted. If he posted that today, I would tell him to go fuck himself and get lost. But back then I was too gentle and kind with assholes like him.
Thanks to one year on TEA, I have toughened up a bit. I would never let a jerk like him speak to me like that anymore.
I am glad to hear he was not all that bad overall and he did some good, but I never got to see that part. I can only speak for the bits of him I have witnessed in my repair topic, and it's not good. 

Anyway I don't care, it's history now.


Yes, for sure you can tell Dubbie to forget about the collet ! 
This scope is a donour and nothing more. It's not worth my time (never mind money) any more. It's sad, I failed at fixing it.. but you have to know when to stop don't you... and I decided to say stop to this 2215. Same for my TDS310, sadly.
It kills me because in both cases / scopes I DID manage to fix the main / original issue, 99% of the work was done and both scopes were back in operation... but I destroyed them when trying to get them from 95% to 100%.... through lack of proper equipment and knowledge and experience. I now am more careful and try to recognize when I am about to fuck something up and make it worse than it is... and to stop before it's too late, and give up or rethink the strategy...I want to progress and give my future repairs a better chance of success... because I care about my rare vintage stuff very much. They aren't as easy to replace as a dirt cheap crappy mundane 2215. Like the old Hameg scopes, the 2215 grow pretty much on trees here.

[Vince]

Philips PM 2421 is pretty close.

Thanks ! It's not "pretty close" you joker... it's 100% the same !  . Now I can google for it and just found better pics of it... and I can now see / read the front panel, what the buttons say.... no Frequency measurement that I can see...

The manual is here:

https://www.opweb.de/deutsch/firma/Philips/herunterladen/Philips--PM_2421--user--ID10878.pdf

Danke schön.
So indeed it can't measure frequency, as I thought... I think the seller got confused with the fact that there is a special connector in the bottom left corner labeled " HF ", the meter can measure AC voltages up to 700MHz with a special probe.
Nice feature though. Also, the basic Vdc accuracy is top notch at 0.1%.
Makes me want to buy it even more, if it were possible but again it isn't. However as always, when an RF mV meter doesn't come with its probe, it's pretty much useless isn't it ?! 

[bd139]

Urf 3465A fun. Just spent two hours reverse engineering the bloody thing. There's a DC offset on every measurement which won't go away. Have posted on HPAK group about it as I'm stuck without the equipment required to debug it at the moment. Will probably take advice and shelve it until I have suitable kit at hand (coming soon  ).

Oh and the Fluke 25 is far superior to the Fluke 75 for mV range measurements 

[Vince]

If you figure out where the DC offset problem originates from.. please do share the details. I have too a (huge) DC offset problem on my old Rochar A.1335 Nixie DVM.
Not the same instrument obviously, but some general concepts might be similar and be applicable to my old DVM as well, or at least give me ideas that might help me, you never know.

[bd139]

I’m going to need to run a full debug on the logic section by the looks as it has auto zero which is driven off the main clock. This is meter specific unfortunately so whatever I find probably won’t be much use 

[med6753]

I didn't want to post my comment in the New Tek thread.

But what in the holy fuck is that abortion? 

Maybe I'm just getting too old for new dog tricks. 

[xrunner]

I didn't want to post my comment in the New Tek thread.

But what in the holy fuck is that abortion? 

Maybe I'm just getting too old for new dog tricks. 

You have to touch the buttons ... but not too hard or it will tip over! 

[mnementh]

A MICSIG got a iPad really drunk and 9 months later...

It's what happens when one of the big playas gets around to making a MICSIG... ten years later. Don't forget to bring a staple-gun so you can make sure it doesn't wander off every fucking time you touch it like my little signal gen...

mnem
Oh, wait... did I say the "Think it in your head" thing and think the "Say it out loud" thing again...?

[TERRA Operative]

Tung oil is your friend here. It stands up to the elements exceptionally well and can be freshened up in the future by a quick, very light once over with Scotchbrite and then a fresh coat of oil. The best thing is that it's about as easy a finish to apply as you can find, no fuss about brush strokes, dust sticking to it as it dries, etc., etc. The finish varies from completely natural and timbery-looking to a deep high gloss - the latter needs lots of coats and careful flatting between coats, the natural looking finish requires no work whatsoever beyond just applying it.

First coat mixed 30/70 or 50/50 oil/turpentine (or whatever your local turps substitute is) to encourage the oil to really 'sink in' to the wood. Wipe on with a rag, leave 15 minutes, wipe off excess with a dry rag, leave 24 hours to cure. Second and subsequent coats use neat undiluted tung oil - wipe on, leave 15 minutes, wipe off excess, leave 24 hours to cure. You can put on as many coats as you like. Two is enough for indoor furniture, three or four for outdoor furniture or wet indoor work surfaces. Note, a little goes a long way, you just need to completely wet the surface of what you're finishing, you don't want to leave anything beyond the bare minimum necessary to wet the surface.

I use tung oil for finishing timber for almost everything. It brings out the natural look of the wood, is easy to apply and repair, is food safe (e.g. for finishing wooden salad bowls, food prep surfaces and the like - you could literally drink pure tung oil) and, apart from the very first coat, the process is solvent and smell free.

See recent sagas of Vince's floor and Mnem's smoking rags for important safety warnings about using any 'drying' oil.

Thanks for the info! It turns out Japan produces some very high quality tung oil (called 桐油 here) and don't export it as they want to keep it for themselves.

I'll go get some and start oiling myself my outdoor furniture up.

I didn't want to post my comment in the New Tek thread.

But what in the holy fuck is that abortion? 

Maybe I'm just getting too old for new dog tricks. 

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/841x783q90/923/ylCPth.jpg

Where are the buttons?! The nice tactile buttons?!

Who wants to bet they are the crap membrane buttons you see on cheap Chinese LED strip remote controls? 

[Cerebus]

I didn't want to post my comment in the New Tek thread.

But what in the holy fuck is that abortion? 

Maybe I'm just getting too old for new dog tricks. 

Clearly someone who's a Dieter Rams/Jony Ive fan got "head of design" at Tektronix but is one step removed from Ives in the same way that Ives was one step removed from Rams. It could have been a good design, but its got too much clutter to hit the aesthetic it's clearly aiming for. If you manage to create a strong enough design statement it doesn't need to say Tektronix, not once but twice, on the front for you to know who made it.

[Cubdriver]

There is this nice Nixie DMM for sale over here :

https://www.leboncoin.fr/collection/2093068228.htm

Looks cool. Guy even pretends it can measure Frequency ?! Of course that is reasonably common place in modern DMM's, but on older Nixie DMM, first time I encounter that. Obviously given that these old DMM's were basically counters at heart, it does not seem that far stretched to implement at least some rudimentary frequency meter  functionality. It's just that all the ones I have seen so far never had that.

So, I am intrigued.. wanted to check the specs of this meter, find a manual for it, it peeked my interest but.... the ad does not say what brand and model it is 
The quality of the picture is not great, small and highly compressed JPEG. Zooming on it doesn't really help. It's fairly certain there is a " Philips " badge in the top right corner, but what model it is... I don't know.
I tried a few guesses but no luck on Google. The best I can find are modern Philips consumer radio receivers, or waffle irons...

Also, I am just as interested in knowing what is this other DMM, modern, handheld, sitting on the pic next to the Nixie DMM ?
I have never seen that one. It's got 6 digits which I didn't even know existed on handheld DMM's....
It does not look cheap chinese, must be some good brand but I have no idea what. Gossen Metra something ?! Didn't they have a weird exotic industrial design similar to this ? I don't know these meters...

Anyway if someone knows what these two meters are, so I can go get a manual and learn more about them, that would be cool ! 

No, I don't want to bother the seller about this, because I have zero intention to buy his meter. Not that I don't want to, but just that I can not : he sells it for 150 Euros, which is 3 times my "impulse buy budget", he says he won't take no offer, and also it's local pick-up only, and of course he leaves half way across the country from me.
So I don't want to waste his time and make him angry.

I am secretly hoping he might lower the price " one day ", because it's been on sale for 5 months now as you can see so... I keep an eye on it, who knows. Hardly holding my breath though...

The old HP/Dymec 2401A/2401C could measure frequency - to a blinding 300 kc, according to the spec sheet (it came out before Hz was widely used for frequency).




Shown here in the 'check' position with the expected 10 kHz display.

This one's still in the queue...

Additional pics:  https://pmanning.smugmug.com/Electronics/HPDymec-2401C-Integrating

-Pat

[Cerebus]

It turns out Japan produces some very high quality tung oil (called 桐油 here) and don't export it as they want to keep it for themselves.

That doesn't surprise me with the tradition of lacquer work in Japan. And I'm further not surprised that they'd look for something a bit more benign than the traditional urushi lacquer.

The traditional Japanese hard lacquer is made from the sap of the lacquer tree (Toxicodendron vernicifluum) related to poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) and the 'oil' extracted from it that is used to do the lacquering is the thing that causes people's reaction to poison ivy/oak. As already said, the Japanese call the lacquer 'oil' urushi, and the western scientific name for the noxious substance in poison ivy/oak is urushiol.

[vk6zgo]

Vince, you have to watch out that the trannystor does not change polarity all of a sudden ...

Many people mistakenly call BJTs "bipolar transistors", which always irritates me, because back in the early 1960s there was a real thing called a "bipolar" transistor, where emitter & collector were fully interchangeable.
The applications were few, & they seem to have disappeared into the mists of time.

In the context you alluded to, I'm not sure where they would appear!

[vk6zgo]

But there are still some things I won't eat: Most liver dishes ... tongue of any variant.

"What does your chef recommend today?" ... "Our plat du jour is tongue in a delicious cream sauce, Monsieur." ... "Yikes! I'd never eat something that has already been in another mouth. Bring me an egg!"

Just think where that egg has been!
Or you could have rump steak--cut off a Bull's backside!

[mnementh]

"Eggs... They're from a chicken's arse!" ~grand-dad

The old man knew how to make us kids clean our plates at breakfast, all right...

mnem
"And don't you dare waste a bite of that pig-butt, or I'll bite your butts!"  Okay, maybe that bit wasn't as funny as I remember... 

[DH7DN]

I didn't want to post my comment in the New Tek thread.

But what in the holy fuck is that abortion? 

Maybe I'm just getting too old for new dog tricks. 

Difficult to understand... Why Tek, why...

[BU508A]

Here is a little riddle for the Tuesday morning for you:

What electronic part has this characteristic curve?

[Zoli]

Here is a little riddle for the Tuesday morning for you:

What electronic part has this characteristic curve?

UJT 
Repair or new build?

[BU508A]

Zoli, that was quick!   

The discussion about those bipolar transistors some postings above inspired me to this little riddle.
No repair  (I hate those UJT, never got used to them).

[bd139]

I didn't want to post my comment in the New Tek thread.

But what in the holy fuck is that abortion? 

Maybe I'm just getting too old for new dog tricks. 

They ripped off the apple studio display design and managed to remove all class and sensibility and proportion from it. Aka they let the engineers design it

[bd139]

Here is a little riddle for the Tuesday morning for you:

What electronic part has this characteristic curve?

Tunnel diode?

Here’s one I measured once for comparison with 33120A and TDS210 and 1K resistor.



Ignore the graticule positioning.

[Cubdriver]

I didn't want to post my comment in the New Tek thread.

But what in the holy fuck is that abortion? 

Maybe I'm just getting too old for new dog tricks. 

They ripped off the apple studio display design and managed to remove all class and sensibility and proportion from it. Aka they let the engineers design it

At one point they had interface design engineers that knew what they were doing, and management listened to them.  Sadly I think those days are long past.



-Pat

[med6753]

I posted the "new" Tek in the Facebook "old" Tek group without any real comment from me and it started a lively and sane discussion until admin got a bug up their arse and without explanation deleted it.  Gee, one day that "new" Tek will be "old" Tek but I'll betcha 50 years hence it will be a chunk of inert silicon.

But of course a way off topic asking if a variac should be placed before or after an isolation transformer is acceptable. Yea, OK. 

[BU508A]

Here is a little riddle for the Tuesday morning for you:

What electronic part has this characteristic curve?

Tunnel diode?

Here’s one I measured once for comparison with 33120A and TDS210 and 1K resistor.



Ignore the graticule positioning.

Hmm, looks very similar to the characteristic curve of the UJT.

For comparison, the charateristic curve of a tunnel diode:

[med6753]

I didn't want to post my comment in the New Tek thread.

But what in the holy fuck is that abortion? 

Maybe I'm just getting too old for new dog tricks. 

They ripped off the apple studio display design and managed to remove all class and sensibility and proportion from it. Aka they let the engineers design it

Is that apple juice she's drinking? Must be.

Don't drink the kool-aid (apple juice).