Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Specmaster]

<snip>
Windows updates has reminded me that my main computer is not compatible with Win11.  I have decided that the fight to get around TPM is not worth it.  For the past couple of weeks I have been playing with Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.2 on an old laptop and desktop.  I quite like it and I like the way it handles updates.  I have a long way to go to learn command line structure but that's OK.  Testing Mint on my Lenovo Thinkcenter M93P, core I7 4990, 32 Gb ram and 512 Gb SSD shows no hardware compatibility issues.  I just have one thing to figure out migrating Thunderbird with my 3 email accounts to another computer so I can do the upgrade and move email back over and then I will be windows free.  Unfortunately, Mrs. GreyWoolfe's computer must remain a Windows computer because she does occasionally do work from home and it took an act of God and 7 Hail Marys to get their idiot of a sysadmin to get a VPN and RDP session set up so she can log into her work computer remotely.  She doesn't want to do that dance again and insists I leave her computer alone.  We will see what happens when Win10 hits EOL and /or her computer slips its mortal coil.

Also I want to wish all you reprobates here a happy and healthy New Year.  This year has been full of challenges for me and I am hoping and praying 2022 will be better and not 2020 (part)2.

Yes, I've been playing around with a version of Linux as, and it does handle updates so much better, allowing you to see what files are being updated is a real bonus. Command line structure will I fear take a long time to master and as for Win 11, unless they drop their stupid hardware demands, it won’t get installed on my machines. I view it as a cynical way to promote more sales of new computers and nothing else. Perhaps someone will come up with a plug-in daughter board that has the TPM module that Win 11 looks for, so that older but otherwise perfectly good PC's can be kept out of landfill.

With rapidly rising inflation and fuel costs set to leap by something like 50%, there just won't be sufficient left out of the pension pot to finance all new hardware so, Linux looks very likely to be residing shortly on my current very capable windows PC.

[Robert763]

Seller responded quite quickly, and asked for video of the problem sent to an external (from ebay) email, along with a repeat of the description of the problem and the order number.

...the usual tactics of letting people jump through a succession of hoops in the hope that they'll eventually give up. Have they already offered you a refund of something like 1 percent of the auction price?

They haven't offered anything as yet. I'm certainly not paying anything for this one, they can send me a return label. It may or may not be fixable, in point of fact the PLL lock LED actually comes on properly now, but the performance otherwise is unchanged.

The fact they asked me to communicate outside ebay undermines their case massively; ebay will frown deeply when they see that and likely come down 100% on my side regardless of anything else.


Oh, here are the pics I sent. You can see the frequency is miles off, and the waveform at the lower frequency is horrible.

Wow, it goes down to millihertz!

[Vince]

Coax cable gang : just woke in up in 2022 with a whoe slew of feedback about it, thanks a bunch ! 

I think I know enough now to complete my Farnell order today.

A few RG58-C cables of various lengths, some adapters, and an RG 174 cable as a "sample" to get a taste of the thin and flexible stuff.

And when I get to the point where I would want to make my own RG58 cables, looks like crimping is my best option and not as expensive as I feared at least for BNC plugs which is what I need.

Thanks again for so much feedback / help ! 

[Vince]

Seller responded quite quickly, and asked for video of the problem sent to an external (from ebay) email, along with a repeat of the description of the problem and the order number.

...the usual tactics of letting people jump through a succession of hoops in the hope that they'll eventually give up. Have they already offered you a refund of something like 1 percent of the auction price?

They haven't offered anything as yet. I'm certainly not paying anything for this one, they can send me a return label. It may or may not be fixable, in point of fact the PLL lock LED actually comes on properly now, but the performance otherwise is unchanged.

The fact they asked me to communicate outside ebay undermines their case massively; ebay will frown deeply when they see that and likely come down 100% on my side regardless of anything else.


Oh, here are the pics I sent. You can see the frequency is miles off, and the waveform at the lower frequency is horrible.

Wow, it goes down to millihertz!

Yes saw that as well. So it's not off by a factor of 2 which was bad enough, but more like a factor of 2,000,000,000 which in my book definitely qualifies for a full refund !!! 

[ch_scr]

Seller responded quite quickly, and asked for video of the problem sent to an external (from ebay) email, along with a repeat of the description of the problem and the order number.

...the usual tactics of letting people jump through a succession of hoops in the hope that they'll eventually give up. Have they already offered you a refund of something like 1 percent of the auction price?

They haven't offered anything as yet. I'm certainly not paying anything for this one, they can send me a return label. It may or may not be fixable, in point of fact the PLL lock LED actually comes on properly now, but the performance otherwise is unchanged.

The fact they asked me to communicate outside ebay undermines their case massively; ebay will frown deeply when they see that and likely come down 100% on my side regardless of anything else.


Oh, here are the pics I sent. You can see the frequency is miles off, and the waveform at the lower frequency is horrible.

, 35MHz shows up as 71.34MHz and 110MHz becomes 142.31MHz, the thing isn't even anywhere near linear making a prediction of the true frequency impossible. Press ahead with a claim through eBay, as you rightly said, trying to resolve outside of their system is a no no and could even carry repercussions for you as well.

And why the hell does the display show mHz instead of MHz? clearly a PoS. 


David

Maybe I had, when typing my post, just seen the shape of the waveform and not the indicated frequency 
In that case I'll eat my (hastyly written) words say that picture alone warrants a full refund or replacement device.

[med6753]

While I'll argue "K" vs "k" all day long I agree that "M" vs "m" is a complete SNAFU and a POS. Demand full refund. 

[BU508A]

Differences in American English and British English explained by ... a German lady:

https://youtu.be/vP0GQS-s4Gw

  

That's fine with me because I can understand her (and most other Germans who speak English) better than the Brits. 

If you want to speak English with a German accent, here is a nice online course from the same lady:

https://youtu.be/Hmy-N4AFNDM

 

[mnementh]

Happy new year to one and all.  My goal is to throw out a lot of stuff. Too many things I haven't touched for years.

Now, now.... lets not get crazy here. I have a whole semi trailer full of stuff I'm unloading here, all of which fits that description to the letter.

Including my old "junkyard dawg" gaming rig PC, upon which I am typing this missive at this very moment. 

mnem
 

[med6753]

Differences in American English and British English explained by ... a German lady:

https://youtu.be/vP0GQS-s4Gw

  

That's fine with me because I can understand her (and most other Germans who speak English) better than the Brits. 

If you want to speak English with a German accent, here is a nice online course from the same lady:

https://youtu.be/Hmy-N4AFNDM

 

Given that I'm 1/4 Deutsch anyway I could probably pull it off without too much difficulty. I'm sure that German in me explains my desire for neatness and order and can't stand disorganized messes. And while I've made it plain that I in general dislike most people the ones that annoy me the most are people who are never on time and in fact would probably be late for their own funeral. 

[Cerebus]

I found it when reading the manuals for my RM564 and was confused about what a UHF connector was, until I came across that and discovered it was in fact the same as the dreaded PL259...

You think you're confused: One of the common names in the UK for the dreaded Belling-Lee 75 ohm aerial connectors that have been the cause of some heated discussion here recently is also a "UHF plug". (Caused, I suspect, by the appearance in British living rooms of lots of little plastic surface mount aerial connectors with "UHF" printed underneath a Belling-Lee connector when British TV switched from VHF to UHF in the 60s.)

[Cerebus]

Seller responded quite quickly, and asked for video of the problem sent to an external (from ebay) email, along with a repeat of the description of the problem and the order number.

...the usual tactics of letting people jump through a succession of hoops in the hope that they'll eventually give up. Have they already offered you a refund of something like 1 percent of the auction price?

I've found that when dealing with the types who seem to be systematic about this, and send risible refund offers using off eBay email, replying on eBay quoting the email usually results in an immediate complete refund with "no need to return the goods". My nasty cynical suspicion that this is to avoid the possibility of the 'off eBay' emails coming to the attention of eBay if they were to get involved in mediating the negotiation. EBay react badly to trying to communicate outside eBay. This isn't because eBay are champions of buyer's right, oh no, eBay simply hates parties communicating directly because they don't want to risk the middleman getting cut out. At least in this case it works in the buyer's favour.

[Cerebus]

Seller responded quite quickly, and asked for video of the problem sent to an external (from ebay) email, along with a repeat of the description of the problem and the order number.

...the usual tactics of letting people jump through a succession of hoops in the hope that they'll eventually give up. Have they already offered you a refund of something like 1 percent of the auction price?

They haven't offered anything as yet. I'm certainly not paying anything for this one, they can send me a return label. It may or may not be fixable, in point of fact the PLL lock LED actually comes on properly now, but the performance otherwise is unchanged.

The fact they asked me to communicate outside ebay undermines their case massively; ebay will frown deeply when they see that and likely come down 100% on my side regardless of anything else.


Oh, here are the pics I sent. You can see the frequency is miles off, and the waveform at the lower frequency is horrible.

Wow, it goes down to millihertz!

Which is a serious insult to proper sig gens like my HP 3325A which goes down to 1 microhertz (one cycle per 11.57..407.. days).

[Cerebus]

While I'll argue "K" vs "k" all day long I agree that "M" vs "m" is a complete SNAFU and a POS. Demand full refund. 

You can't have it both ways. Either you have to give in on kilo versus Kelvin, or remain eternally confused between femto, Farad and  Fahrenheit. 

[mnementh]

Yes ideally that's what I would like to do : get a 100m reel of good quality cable, and make my own cables as I need them. Thanks for suggestions on what brand to buy...
Didn't know you could solder BNC connector to make cables.. tought it was only crimped.  Soldering sound more reliable no ? And easier probably, and does not require expensive tooling.
I like that... sell me some cable  and a bag of amphenol solder BNC's ! 

Properly done*, crimped is likely more reliable - it makes a gas-tight connection, and doesn't stiffen the wire the way that solder can if it wicks up into the stranding.  The other challenge with soldering if it's not Teflon cable is to not overheat and melt the dielectric of the center conductor.  That said, most of the BNCs I've used at work in the past (mostly on RG-316) have been solder pin/crimp shield - it's a reasonable compromise, but again unless the dielectric is Teflon (as the 316 is) it can get melty (HDPE insulated coax is a royal bitch to solder!).  It's also fun to get the solder into the tiny hole on the side of the pin without getting a glob on the outside, too, which then must be filed/scraped/melted off in order to get the pin to properly fit into the hole in the connector.  I used to keep needle files and an exacto knife handy, but definitely preferred crimp/crimp overall.

Dies for the common interchangeable ratcheting crimpers aren't usually too terribly pricy, so crimping of BNC connectors is typically less costly than trying to find the specialized crimpers used for, for instance, Molex pins and the like.

Happy New Year, all - let's hope 2022 is better than the past two years have been...

-Pat

* the italicized part is critical here

I have quite a bit of recent experience doing exactly this type of soldering; you'll find that a lot of the Chinesium WiFi gear nowadays has done away with µFL/IPX connectors on the external antennae whips and they solder the coax directly to pads on the mainboard. This is also how many of the RC transmitters & receivers are assembled now; all this gear operates primarily in the 0.9/2.4/5.8GHz bands.

      

Most do use RG316 or RG178; but some use RG174 or other PE dielectric cable and still soldered direct to the PCB, as seen above. 

This is a practice which is entirely dependent upon soldering skill; I've seen some pretty crappy soldering of this technique on brand-new out of the box equipment. 

This is why I make it a practice to double-check the antenna soldering on all my new RC and WiFi gear.

mnem
 

[med6753]

While I'll argue "K" vs "k" all day long I agree that "M" vs "m" is a complete SNAFU and a POS. Demand full refund. 

You can't have it both ways. Either you have to give in on kilo versus Kelvin, or remain eternally confused between femto, Farad and  Fahrenheit. 

I do choose to have it both ways and there ain't nothing you can do about it.  No confusion here. 

[mnementh]

@Zucca: (I'm a barbarian and I have fruit in my panna cotta.)

As long is not pineapple on pizza, I can forgive you.

I've had that. It's not the worst thing people put on pizza. The Swedish pizza culture is driven by people from the Balkans; first it was the Italians who took it to Sweden, but then the Greek and after them the Jugoslavians (as it were, back then) took over.  Today, a Swedish pizzeria is operated by immigrants, almost never from Italy, and they serve Kebab, hamburgers, and pizzas. These three kinds of food have cross-bred, and a very common one is the "kebab pizza".   Personally, I rate that below pineapple pizza.

To their credit, most pizzerias today also have a more expensive set of slightly more italian-looking pizzas on the menu. They are more like what you get in Italy, but of course rarely as good.  A select few pizzerias are the real deal; they often have a wood-fired oven built by masons from Napoli, and they churn out thin, crusty pizzas with only the right stuff on.

But, to summarize, there is a distinct swedish pizza style, that has mostly the name common with what's being served in Italy.

And, the most busy day at the pizzerias in Sweden is New Years day. The tradition is that you fix hangover by ordering pizza and watching Ivanhoe on TV. Some swedish TV channel (it varies which) has transmitted Ivanhoe every New Years day since the early 90s. 

There were leftovers of the Panna Cotta (I made 25 portions, for a party with 10 and went over to my parents with two portions to make sure they had a good evening) and there is Recioto left. Also, a rather large portion of one of the wine bottles for dinner (again, Drago from east of Verona) was spared.

I think we can have our home-made pizzas in style. (my recipe currently is tomato sauce, fennel salami, feta cheese, thinly sliced onion and then grated mozarella on top.

In the eraly years in Neaples there were only 3 pizzas:

1- Marinara (tomato & anchoives, NO cheese)
2- Margherita (tomato, mozzarella di bufala campana, basil)
3- Calzone, bigger and folded to increase stuffing capacity. This was the one if you were really hungry.

Anyway the tomato is of course the San Marzano.

Even nowadays the most famous pizzerie in Neaples have a very limited menu (Thank God!)
Example: L'Antica pizzeria da Michele serves only TWO pizzas.
They are so full everyday of people, packed like a board with BGA. Every single day. The line is huge, just order take away and go to the next bar... they will welcome you with a dish a cutlery....

My general rules:

IF (No wood oven) THEN
      (walk away)
ELSE
      IF (they speak italian) THEN
               IF (the pizzas on the tables looks decent) THEN
                       (ask for a seat)
               ELSE
                      (walk away)
      ELSE
             (walk away)
               
 that said I had to confess when I was in Arjeplog for winter testing, I ate reindeer pizza. Mehhh, I did not like it but I could not resist.

Ummm... you do know that pizza pie as it is now known is not an actually an Italian dish, but rather originated as street vendor/micro-eatery food invented by Italian immigrants in New York City? They couldn't get white-bread workaday people to buy Calzone as the contents weren't visible, and nobody trusted "street-meat"... so they made them open-faced, and a whole new form of food-vending was born.

Knowing this, it seems rather silly to be having snobbery about any of it, at least to me...

mnem
*grew up within walking distance of Caruso's, which was at the time well-known to be one of the best pizzas on the Eastern Seaboard*

[mnementh]

   Oi... spinning rust is sooooo slow... 

Currently updating my old gaming rig (Athlon FX-8350 8-Core 4.0GHz/16GB DDR3-667/XFX RX580 Black Edition) which has been in the trailer unused for 2 years to the latest Win10, so I can have something to peek in here on while I let my son use my i7 laptop on his new 27in/1mS/IPS eSports monitor for his gaming sessions.

Well, and cuz I could. 

mnem
*cellar-dweller dwagon again*

Don't be too hard on it, it is after all having to do 2 years of updates.

Windows updates has reminded me that my main computer is not compatible with Win11.  I have decided that the fight to get around TPM is not worth it.  For the past couple of weeks I have been playing with Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.2 on an old laptop and desktop.  I quite like it and I like the way it handles updates.  I have a long way to go to learn command line structure but that's OK.  Testing Mint on my Lenovo Thinkcenter M93P, core I7 4990, 32 Gb ram and 512 Gb SSD shows no hardware compatibility issues.  I just have one thing to figure out migrating Thunderbird with my 3 email accounts to another computer so I can do the upgrade and move email back over and then I will be windows free.  Unfortunately, Mrs. GreyWoolfe's computer must remain a Windows computer because she does occasionally do work from home and it took an act of God and 7 Hail Marys to get their idiot of a sysadmin to get a VPN and RDP session set up so she can log into her work computer remotely.  She doesn't want to do that dance again and insists I leave her computer alone.  We will see what happens when Win10 hits EOL and /or her computer slips its mortal coil.

Also I want to wish all you reprobates here a happy and healthy New Year.  This year has been full of challenges for me and I am hoping and praying 2022 will be better and not 2020 (part)2.

Naaahhh... I'm doing the 20H2 Update manually from the MS media download server (1Gb synchronous FTTH FTW ), skipping all the crap in between. However, it has failed to complete once already... there may be a critical patch it needs to be able to complete.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

<snip>
And to not start any more international incidents. 

mnem
*heeds Hypnos' siren call*

What is the dwagon loosing his firepower now, mellowing in his old age then eh?

Trying to simplify my life; I thought I might start with being a little choosier when picking my battles.

mnem

[Specmaster]

<snip>
And to not start any more international incidents. 

mnem
*heeds Hypnos' siren call*

What is the dwagon loosing his firepower now, mellowing in his old age then eh?

Trying to simplify my life; I thought I might start with being a little choosier when picking my battles.

mnem

I on the other hand dislike battles but if there is one thing I hate more than battles, it's injustice and that will get me into a battle, simply through trying to right an injustice, be it against me or someone else. I always look for the good in people and try to give the benefit of doubt whenever I can.. but sometimes that approach can wear a bit thin as one can only soak up so much before something gives.

[mnementh]

...I'm doing the 20H2 Update manually from the MS media download server (1Gb synchronous FTTH FTW ), skipping all the crap in between. However, it has failed to complete once already... there may be a critical patch it needs to be able to complete.

Pray for me... *wibble*

mnem
 

[Cerebus]

Ummm... you do know that pizza pie as it is now known is not an actually an Italian dish, but rather originated as street vendor/micro-eatery food invented by Italian immigrants in New York City?

[Citation Required] 

[McBryce]

Looking for suggestions... I know none of us here usually need motivation to acquire more TEA, but I've been assessing my lab over the last few days and have decided that the obvious missing device on my bench is a VTVM. What VTVM would you guys recommend? Keeping in mind - It shouldn't be the size of a truck. It shouldn't be some rarity that goes for silly money. It should be relatively easy to find in Europe. It should be a device where the schematics and parts are readily available.

McBryce.

[Martin Miranda]

  horsing around, finished recapping a old pm 6672.

https://youtu.be/jU8SWO4a9RQ

[mnementh]

This will take a while... Famous last words. 

mnem
*sent by threatening my smartPwn with cold oscilloscope probes* 

[dl6lr]

Removed the awful UHF connector and installed a proper Triax connector instead. I have 0 regrets 

UHF is the abbreviation for "Unsuitable for High Frequencies"