Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[TERRA Operative]

Yeah, the scope was buy it now and comes with probes and pouch as shown.

The 334A was auction, but no-one else bid.... Sometimes you get lucky. Been looking for one of these for a little while to check and test my function gens.


On the topic of international postage, I found some TM500 module plastic faceplates I want, but not for US$90+ in shipping, each.....

[Specmaster]

EDIT: It does beg the question though, why the hell wasn't he chaperoned?

Well they would not pay overtime for a competent employee to do the testing so why whould they pay for one to watch a contractor? 

Good grief...   

Did they change their minds when they saw the repair bill?

No. They just used a different PAT contractor.
There seems to be a belief amonst some senior managors thet by subcontracting this sort of thing that they are reducing their liability or/and risk of legal sanction against them personally. In fact it does nothing of the sort. The company is responsible. If a item is tested (properly) at 9AM but bevlops a fault that causes injury at 9:30AM the company is still liable. Thre is case law for this. It was non electrical. A lifting aid at Vauxhall in Luton IIRC. It as tested reguarly but failed and acused a back injury.
The thing that drives PAT is insurance. Many commercial policies require portable appliance testing.
 

Correct, but it must surely be in any reasonably sized companies, best interest to purchase their own test equipment and have their own competent engineers do the testing? 

[TERRA Operative]

A company I prevously worked for made equipment that was sold all over the world. Most had IEC power inlets. We used a Seward Supernova or two for production testing. However for some reason the senior manaement decided we could not do our own PAT  So they emplyed a contractor. He came in over the weekend. Amonst otherthings the passed a diecast box withe a IEC inelt but nothing else, not even earth connection, that was on my bench.  They had been told not to go into the R&D section. They alss took all the safety (T earth pin) plugs off the high power lasers. these were only supposed to be plugged ito the door interlocked outlets.
In production they took all the new and bagged IEC leads in stores and tested them. For the EU North American and Austrailian leads they cut the plugs off and fitted 13A ones 
His tester was a battery powered one with no high current earth or flash capability. He didn't get paid........

 

EDIT: It does beg the question though, why the hell wasn't he chaperoned?

Well they would not pay overtime for a competent employee to do the testing so why would they pay for one to watch a contractor? 

It also just highlights the difference between the average contractor and an engineer, especially if said contractor used to be a house basher, then he'd never ever come across such plugs and sockets, equally never come across clean earth varieties either.

As an electrician who often had to do this sort of testing, I can at least say there is one electrician who wouldn't cut off a weird looking plug without asking....

[mnementh]

EDIT: It does beg the question though, why the hell wasn't he chaperoned?

Well they would not pay overtime for a competent employee to do the testing so why whould they pay for one to watch a contractor? 

Good grief...   

Did they change their minds when they saw the repair bill?

No. They just used a different PAT contractor.
There seems to be a belief amonst some senior managors thet by subcontracting this sort of thing that they are reducing their liability or/and risk of legal sanction against them personally. In fact it does nothing of the sort. The company is responsible. If a item is tested (properly) at 9AM but bevlops a fault that causes injury at 9:30AM the company is still liable. Thre is case law for this. It was non electrical. A lifting aid at Vauxhall in Luton IIRC. It as tested reguarly but failed and acused a back injury.
The thing that drives PAT is insurance. Many commercial policies require portable appliance testing.
 

Correct, but it must surely be in any reasonably sized companies, best interest to purchase their own test equipment and have their own competent engineers do the testing? 

You're thinking like a engineer who knows something of actual value, not like a insurance lawyer which are the ones who the PHBs actually listen to. 

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

Equally it could also slide down your windscreen and cause you to have an accident, especially if you are braking, and hence why I always understood it to be an offence to have snow on the roof.

It's more likely to slide all the way down the bonnet and in front of the car, especially on a modern. If it got under the wheels and you lost traction it would be "exciting", as you would be braking at the time, almost certainly.

Reading the rules through and the laws annotated to them, my understanding is the offence is not the snow on the roof, but if it subsequently causes one of the issues outlined. It's not really very clear, and I suspect it would be fiendishly hard to obtain a conviction without it having had some pretty serious consequences. I honestly can't see the average copper writing out an FPN over this, unless he/she was having a really slow and boring day.

Either way, I always remove all snow from the lights, bonnet, roof, boot and windows using the appropriate tools for the job which includes gloves.

[Andrew_Debbie]

That is a very nice meter. Colour me jelly.

Thanks.   Not bad for £25 and another £20 in parts.    I don't count the time I spent fixing it because that was fun

 There is a mechanical problem on the reference/buffer board I need to fix.  Two transistors need to be thermally coupled.   They used to be but the bond broke.   I've been staying away from it because they are coupled by a beryllium oxide washer.  Until then it isn't going to meet the temperature stability specs.    At some point I'll break out the PPE and glue the thing down.



I was surprised how good the specs are.   I was even more surprised that the 10VDC range is still in spec.





   

[Specmaster]

Todays really stupid postal charges on eBay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/294459893718, £145.20 by UPS from Virginia to the UK, for a Fluke 87 

This isn't a new problem, UPS international has been about three times the price of regular USPS for many years, hence why I've rarely bought anything where it's the only service offered.

The Fluke doesn't look a very good buy either, at least three problems mentioned, including non-functional capacitance range and buggered input jack plastics. 

David

Yeah, I never even got to that stage, shipping cost stopped me dead in my tracks 

[Cubdriver]

Well, I bought a new scope. 1Ghz TDS784C for 66,483 yen.
 I think I'm at, what... 11 scopes now I think? I should sell some....

And for dessert, I bought a 334A Distortion Analyzer for 12,800 yen too. 
(Photos from the listings).

One step further down the calibration rabbit hole, now I'll fix this stuff up, to fix up the stuff I need to use to fix up the stuff I actually want to use... Possibly with a few more steps of fixing stuff in between..
Soon I'll have all the gear ready to re-calibrate the Tek 2467 scope I accidentally wiped the cal memory on when replacing the backup battery.... 

Such is the great circle of life TEA. 

Sell?!?  Why would you do that?  You just crossed the halfway point!   
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/why-does-everyone-have-twenty-oscilliscopes/25/

Now you only need nine more!

-Pat

[mnementh]

The plot thickens.. I had a 'virgin' 199C. Used it only with an original charger. The battery was dead, obviously, installed a new one. Worked fine. Concerning a concern from someone: the sense resistor value was spot on, so no chemical degradation or something... I then "refreshed" the battery. Worked fine, battery guage showed "full" afterwards.

I then had run down completely (untill it turned off). Had 3.5h+, so that's not too bad.

Plugged the charger back in in order not to send out the device with a depleted battery. This morning, the battery was hot (some 40C according to the NTC). Device still turned on, showed battery not full.

That was also the last time it turned on. The sense resistor is still fine, but it doesn't turn on with either battery or adapter.

Bleh.  Can't sell them like this. Will need to dig a lot deeper.

That sucks. Lots of money in the balance with in even a dozen of those bad boys out of inventory. I wish I were a bit closer and could take a crack at one, just for fun.

Dumb question... have you tried a new replacement battery from Fluke? Maybe they have some form of doomsday countdown timer in the supervisor IC like some laptop batteries were alleged to have back in the day. 

mnem
 

Like "unless you feed me a new original battery, you"re fucked"? Eh, wouldn't think so. Only batteries and NTC in the pack. And The Signal Path has made a LiOn mod for it, he didn't report any issues.

Kinda thinking it would be cheaper/easier converting them all to LiOn. Eh, well, supplies came in. Let's have some fun. To be continued.

*EDIT* Also: not excluding sending you one as an option. Shipping is, well cheaper, than blowing up two of these a week.

Oh, seriously, these have NiMH/NiCd packs in them...?

Hmmm... that old, the IR of the OEM pack may have gotten high enough that it just tanks immediately on power-on. I've had that before; where a pack seems to revive for a cycle or two, then one or more cells goes high IR and it's done.

And now that I think of it... your new aftermarket packs may have the inverse problem: low enough IR to be able to draw too much current from a charging circuit that isn't designed for modern high-current NiMH cells.

Hmmmm... I wonder if your units would work if you charged the new aftermarket packs completely from a bench supply before installing them...? But then... if a customer completely discharged the pack and it draws too much from the OEM charging circuit... 

Well, that would explain the one you got back from your customer, tho. Another possibility is that the OEM pack has some form of OCP; maybe as simple as a Polyfuse. That could even be buried in the cell cluster...

mnem
*fulminating at the mind again*

[AVGresponding]

Ok, hang on to your wallets, ebay list time!   



Probably an easy fix, worth it if you can win on a maiden bid: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/353705233718





These need bidding up, I want good money when I sell mine!     https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/174973689471 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/194440650721





Not into mad money. Yet. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/393625354266





This needs bidding up too, or bd139 will have trouble selling his!     https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255167870164





This looks like the sort of thing that mansaxel plays with at work:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255167918209





This could well just be display multiplexing interacting badly with the camera shutter. It runs at quite a low frequency on these:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373754748158





DMM in AMM form factor. Ugly, but charming, the Jean-Paul Belmondo of TE:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373754739393





This poor old thing looks like it needs some tlc:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373754760220





Slightly wrong description, but not expensive for pro-grade gear like this:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403222248872





I'm very interested to see how this does, not that I'd ever sell mine, but it's good to know for insurance purposes at least:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373755854641





I can't decide whether I like these or not:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373755906497





Cheap Metcal:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185106722696





This made way more than I expected. I hope the winning bidder didn't misread, and think they were getting the world's cheapest ever...  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/304171563959

[AVGresponding]

Thanks.   Not bad for £25 and another £20 in parts.    I don't count the time I spent fixing it because that was fun

I was surprised how good the specs are.   I was even more surprised that the 10VDC range is still in spec.





 

100GΩ input impedance on the 200V range!   

This thing must have been a small fortune when new!

[mnementh]

In all honesty, it's not like there weren't huge, glowing signs screaming that their old business model was going extinct long before they actually started hemorrhaging money; can you really blame people who had the option for taking a fat retirement over rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic..?

I beg to differ on the business model. Renting compute to people is very much alive. It still, on average, is a much better deal for the landlord than the customer.

IBM never made money on direct sales, not compared to the cashflow on rentals. I still remember being flabbergasted the first time I heard about the AS/400 "memory upgrade" -- it involved a CE, and a floppy disk. The CE came, took down the machine, inserted the disk, made some incantations (all 8 characters long) on the console, IPLed the machine, and hey presto! The previously-installed RAM, that had been disabled, now was available.  It felt wrong, because it is.

Mind you, ECC RAM for POWER machines never was cheap. I once bought 32GiB RAM for a RS/6000 server, back when most big e-commerce ran on allegedly mega-large machines that were maxed out at 4GiB. That cost about $200000, and was, by one order of magnitude, the most expensive part of the machine.

Wrong business model. It wasn't the "compute rental" I'm talking aboot; there you have a fixed cost per unit of compute load, however you choose to measure it.

It was the rental, plus the salaried on-site lab coats, plus the salaried data preparers, plus the salaried x, y, and Z personnel which were a mandatory part of the contract and got paid whether your machine was up or down that I'm talking aboot. Now all that is bundled into the x dollars for z amount of compute load business model, so is completely transparent to the customer. All the customer has to do is make sure they can connect to your datacenter and run their machine on your hardware. Anything more than that is the "cost-plus gravy" services equivalent of the white coats priesthood, which the customer can decide when and how much they need.

Which, IMHO, is the way it should be.

mnem
At least, that's the way I see it. Enlighten me if I'm not seeing the whole picture.

[Cubdriver]

When Itty Bitty Morons was rolling in cash, up until 1992 or so, if you needed something you got it. No questions asked.

After the bean counters took over you couldn't buy a pencil unless you got at least 2 levels of management signature. 

A perfect example of penny wise and pound foolish.  How much did the pencil (or other small item) ultimately cost after the time spent jumping through all the needless hoops?

People who insist on doing silly things for no good reason drive me insane.  I told an old boss that I needed to run out to the local electronics emporium (perhaps a 25-30 minute round trip) get a part to complete something.  We stood and went back and forth for at least twenty minutes as he argued that it would take too long and was a waste of time.  Then I went and got the part. 

A more recent example is from about ten years ago at my present job - went on a trip and submitted my expense report.  Distance to the airport on my odometer showed something like fifty-four miles.  I was relatively new at the time and didn't know they wanted a mileage report with starting and ending odometer readings submitted too, to document the travel.  The girl in accounting, rather than contacting me, proceeded to go onto Google Earth and calculate the mileage from my house to the airport, and 'corrected' it to the Google Earth figure of fifty-THREE miles. Reduced my round trip expense payout by around $0.54.     Wonder how long it took her to go to Google, input the addresses and calculate the mileage.  Likely more than half a buck.

-Pat

[mnementh]

Well, I bought a new scope. 1Ghz TDS784C for 66,483 yen.
 I think I'm at, what... 11 scopes now I think? I should sell some....

And for dessert, I bought a 334A Distortion Analyzer for 12,800 yen too. 
(Photos from the listings).

One step further down the calibration rabbit hole, now I'll fix this stuff up, to fix up the stuff I need to use to fix up the stuff I actually want to use... Possibly with a few more steps of fixing stuff in between..
Soon I'll have all the gear ready to re-calibrate the Tek 2467 scope I accidentally wiped the cal memory on when replacing the backup battery.... 

Such is the great circle of life TEA. 

Unless I'm badly mistaken about current exchange rates, that's a pretty damn good price. Congratulations!

Yeah, a little less than US$700 for both pieces. Izzat Jammy Git territory?

mnem
 

[factory]

Well, I bought a new scope. 1Ghz TDS784C for 66,483 yen.
 I think I'm at, what... 11 scopes now I think? I should sell some....

And for dessert, I bought a 334A Distortion Analyzer for 12,800 yen too. 
(Photos from the listings).

One step further down the calibration rabbit hole, now I'll fix this stuff up, to fix up the stuff I need to use to fix up the stuff I actually want to use... Possibly with a few more steps of fixing stuff in between..
Soon I'll have all the gear ready to re-calibrate the Tek 2467 scope I accidentally wiped the cal memory on when replacing the backup battery.... 

Such is the great circle of life TEA. 

Unless I'm badly mistaken about current exchange rates, that's a pretty damn good price. Congratulations!

Yeah, not a bad price for the 334A, considering what they were selling for here last year, I wrongly thought prices had dropped back to normal, as one made just over £50 this week, looking more closely it was a bit of a mess, with glued together panel meter and crusty flaking dial. 


David

[mansaxel]

This looks like the sort of thing that mansaxel plays with at work:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255167918209

That would get pretty close. And the starting bid is OK. Pity is that you'd need 2. We mostly do passive filters; the long-range stuff is outsourced to a carrier. We have zero desire to send people to comms huts all over the country. But, a lot of the time we do interact with the carrier and launch alien waves into their filters - at least for the local loop at sites where a lot of lines converge. I suspect they transpond it electrically onto a wave in their DWDM system once it reaches their site.

We are going to play with 100G coherent waves soon, which will be a big bonus for our metro runs where we with the usual 4-channel 100GBASE-ER4 transceivers would need another fiber pair for each line (although the 100G fits together with 40 channels of 10G, by using the 1310 spectrum part -- the ER4 runs as 4 off 25G channels at 1295.56,1300.05, 1304.59 and 1309.14 nm ) With a coherent wave we can squeeze the entire 100G into one ITU DWDM grid channel.

[Robert763]

I was in Alberta a a few years ago. Arrived for meeting in sunshine, had lunch outside. went back in for two hours and found 2"+ of snowfall. I wasn't driving and the driver of the people carrier didn't clear the roof. 20 minutes later driver braked at a junction and the snow slid off the roof and blocked the windscreen. Wipers would not shift it so he had to get out and clear it with a bunch of unhappy drivers behind. Two hours later it had all melted.
 

[mnementh]

   Cheap Metcal:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185106722696

Oh, FFS people... somebody buy this! I'm crying in my last glass of iced tea that I can't snatch it away right now!!!

mnem
 

[factory]

Can't remember who said they missed out on one of these counters last week, item is in Germany;
https://www.ebay.de/itm/144248467377


Seller also has a 13C  oscilloscope;
https://www.ebay.de/itm/144248463110


David

[mnementh]

mnem
 

[Robert763]

EDIT: It does beg the question though, why the hell wasn't he chaperoned?

Well they would not pay overtime for a competent employee to do the testing so why whould they pay for one to watch a contractor? 

Good grief...   

Did they change their minds when they saw the repair bill?

No. They just used a different PAT contractor.
There seems to be a belief amonst some senior managors thet by subcontracting this sort of thing that they are reducing their liability or/and risk of legal sanction against them personally. In fact it does nothing of the sort. The company is responsible. If a item is tested (properly) at 9AM but bevlops a fault that causes injury at 9:30AM the company is still liable. Thre is case law for this. It was non electrical. A lifting aid at Vauxhall in Luton IIRC. It as tested reguarly but failed and acused a back injury.
The thing that drives PAT is insurance. Many commercial policies require portable appliance testing.
 

Correct, but it must surely be in any reasonably sized companies, best interest to purchase their own test equipment and have their own competent engineers do the testing?

We alread had TWO Seward SuperNovas and plenty of competent engineers. We tested our own production, but somehow the management were insistent we cold not do it ourselves. It may have been mis-information propigated by testing companies to get more business. The changed all the plugs because that was extra work for which they charged about £10 compared to 50p per item for the test.
Total rip-off.
I've seen similar with driving licence checks. Companies in the UK were made liable if their employees don't have the correct licence when driving on company business. A number of companies sprang up to "manage" this for companies. Even their small print says it's still the employer that's liable if they make a mistake.
Management "compliance" tick box and single invoice for the bean counters   

[mnementh]

That is a very nice meter. Colour me jelly.

Thanks.   Not bad for £25 and another £20 in parts.    I don't count the time I spent fixing it because that was fun

 There is a mechanical problem on the reference/buffer board I need to fix.  Two transistors need to be thermally coupled.   They used to be but the bond broke.   I've been staying away from it because they are coupled by a beryllium oxide washer.  Until then it isn't going to meet the temperature stability specs.    At some point I'll break out the PPE and glue the thing down.

Safety

BeO is carcinogenic in powdered form[12] and may cause a chronic allergic-type lung disease berylliosis. Once fired into solid form, it is safe to handle if not subjected to machining that generates dust, clean breakage releases little dust but crushing or grinding actions can pose a risk.[13] Beryllium oxide ceramic is not a hazardous waste under federal law in the USA.[citation needed]

Hmmm... is this a thing where the combination of the washer and thermal cement may or may not be better than modern silicone thermal pads?

Just curious. Yes, I get that this requires handling it either way.

mnem
*toddles off to be... slightly off*

[factory]

Ok, hang on to your wallets, ebay list time!   
This needs bidding up too, or bd139 will have trouble selling his!     https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255167870164

Shouldn't think he'll have any problems selling the second one, he has already sold one & the EDU PoS one.

I can't decide whether I like these or not:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373755906497

Must be an easier way of changing the battery, rather than going through all this bother. 


It does explain why the dead battery never got replaced in the DL1520 at work, I don't remember it giving that error message (older firmware???), but it did lose all the settings when powered off.

David

[Robert763]

   Cheap Metcal:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185106722696

Oh, FFS people... somebody buy this! I'm crying in my last glass of iced tea that I can't snatch it away right now!!!

mnem
 

OK if you insist.....

[tautech]

Ok, hang on to your wallets, ebay list time!   
This needs bidding up too, or bd139 will have trouble selling his!     https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255167870164

Shouldn't think he'll have any problems selling the second one, he has already sold one & the EDU PoS one.
David

Yeah but all the others BD nabbed had USB whereas these earlier ones didn't.
Some 15 years back when I got my TDS2012B I was specially chasing ones with USB as not easily grabbing screenshots is a real PITA.