Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Ice-Tea]

I don't need any of them and my TE budget is small, so please please please tell me you are going to bid

No. 

[PA0PBZ]

I think can see them  .

*Will delete if Vince requests so

[Vince]

Nto sure what you mean ? I did say that I have got fiber in the street, fiber cabinet located in my very street, exchange only 1km away, down my street + a few meters. See map below.

It's all very new, so as I said 90+ of the houses in my street are not connect-able to the fiber : the fiber has been

...

You might want to delete this pic. The whole internet knows where you live now.

Theres a whole pilgrimage of Tek collectors worshippers from all over europe on the move already, to come to the collection and maybe touch a blue scope in passing 
Better put out a few parasol and a water cooler on the porch to prepare 

OK looks like you are all paranoid, so I have just adjusted for that, touched up the pic.

The fact that you think a  scum bag would be not only competent enough (able to read English top begin with), but also stupid enough to waste his time watching TEA where there is only one frog posting (regularly), thinking it was the most efficient way to find a target, is adorable. I love you all   

If I do get burglered, no it's not a word apparently, says firefox, it's gonna be the tech who fixed my ADSL box yesterday, of course. He obviously had no choice but see all my stuff, if just so he could try not to trip on it whilst finding his way to the ADSL box...

[mnementh]

Of course the real solution to streaming congestion existed a long time ago, native multicast. At the LINX we ran an experimental native multicast peering exchange and we even had an early version of BBC iPlayer running over it. But although it worked well enough we never managed to attract critical mass to it.

With native multicast your local machine tells its upstream router that it wants to subscribe to a particular stream, that router tells the router upstream from it and so on. So if five households on the same street cabinet want to watch the same stream only one copy of that stream goes to the cabinet, and then five copies of that stream are sent onward - four streams worth of bandwidth on the cabinet's backhaul are freed up compared to the current situation of five whole identical streams going all the way through the system. The same savings can be made at each level of router hierarchy.

Something very similar is how the streamers concentrate traffic at the ISP if they have a co-located server there. One copy is hauled into the ISP over transit or peering, but multiple copies are forwarded on to the consumers, but without the benefit of multicast at the intermediate stages of the ISP network. So 100s or thousands or 10s of thousands of copies of the same stream may all be being pushed side by side through the ISPs distribution network. If you've ever started streaming something and it has taken 15 seconds to start, it's the traffic concentrating box waiting for a slot in the hope that another customer who also wants to watch it comes along, and it can haul one stream for the two of you back from wherever it starts from (there are also technical reasons why even if it already has the stream it pays to play it out simultaneously to as many customers as possible [avoiding disk reads, buffer copies etc.]).

Yeah, I miss the days when multicast was available on the Internet. Would have made a lot of problems easier, while complicating others.

The current trend away from linear programming into video-on-demand is sort of hard to satisfy using multicast (unless there's caching involved of course). The realm of simultaneous events best appreciated in near-real-time is today more or less reduced to sports.

One of the problems with multicast was just the puny DSLAM nodes you mentioned, whose under-powered, over-priced hardware would deal very badly with the largely trivial task of multiplying packets.  This put a financial strain on the distribution network which was, and remains so, the least profitable part of the infrastructure, where few subscribers pay for quite a lot of hardware and cable plant.

This of course also made bean counter heads explode because they could not fathom that someone elses stream being expanded in their network was a benefit. Surely, it was work performed, and therefore had to be billed!

The technical arguments for multicast are good enough, though, that in the coveted "triple-play" model where the ISP becomes telco and cable TV company and bills one inflated bill for various IP traffic, quite often employs a multicast delivery model for linear TV.  But this of course is not an Internet service; it can't be moved outside the provider net.

Similarly, in TV production, multicast is king. We handle several 100 gbit of multicast in our internal net. It leaves the house as unicast, though.

Once upon a time you had to wait for a buffer to build up when watching any streaming video; sometimes as much as 30 seconds or even several minutes! *gasp* The HORROR!   Okay, and you too, Vince.

Having been in a Netflix test market, I cut the broadcast cord over a decade ago; I've seen how the service has improved over a long sample time. I've often wondered if there might be a viable business model here; if you could find some incentive that would appeal to those smart enough to understand how much BW true "On-Demand" video wastes because most consumers expect that to mean 500ms or less before something is moving across their screen. Something along the lines of turning the money saved into better services, better/newer content, or better pricing if you were just willing to go to the effing bathroom while your 3rd rewatch of Avengers Endgame queues up... maybe even make it a tier on the ISP itself, something they can bundle for those still in BW-impoverished areas.

We already do this in a way with wireless data... most carriers now have apps for your phone where you can watch endless hours of yoobToob videos and streaming radio without it counting against your data cap. This media is of course mostly carefully curated low-resolution versions of the stuff we'd normally watch on a TV or PC monitor. and folks still seem willing to accept that their kids might have to wait 10 seconds for that Baby Shark vid to start playing on a phone in the middle of nowhere...

mnem

[Vince]

I think can see them  .

No you can't... image is old, I have since installed a curtain 

I am glad it was visible from the street for a while though. Got people curious and made a couple friends because of that.
An old retired guy saw the Tek collection as he was passing by on bis electric bicycle, and stopped to say hi.

Now we are good friends and he keeps giving me old electronic stuff instead of scrapping it.

Got a 32" TV, a CRT TV, a CCTV monitor and Camera, 4 loud speakers pairs including two decent ones, one was a Marantz I am now using in the lab, a nice vintage QUAD33 audio preamp, a home cinema amp, an inverter / UPS, a VCR with a Star Wars tape, even stuff to help me build my garage and god knows what else, can't even remember it all. He just keeps bringing stuff now he knows I like salvaging parts from old electronic stuff.

Then a neighbour just across the street, gave me a big industrial 3 Phase Frequency converter / speed controller he was using on his lathe.

Now that I have put a curtain, I have not made any new friends 

[Vince]

Now I know where you live! I'm gonna come and break into your house and upgrade all your TDS scopes!     

No need to break into in order to do that ! Just arrange an appointment and I will gladly let you in and offer you a drink ! 

However if you do come I hope you won't just come with some F/W on a USB stick. To make the trip wotrth the while I would hope you would offer me a fully optionned up 784D or even better a 794D, of course with 4 1GHz active probes to go with it !

You are welcome any time !! 

[david77]

Nto sure what you mean ? I did say that I have got fiber in the street, fiber cabinet located in my very street, exchange only 1km away, down my street + a few meters. See map below.

It's all very new, so as I said 90+ of the houses in my street are not connect-able to the fiber : the fiber has been

...

You might want to delete this pic. The whole internet knows where you live now.

Theres a whole pilgrimage of Tek collectors worshippers from all over europe on the move already, to come to the collection and maybe touch a blue scope in passing 
Better put out a few parasol and a water cooler on the porch to prepare 

OK looks like you are all paranoid, so I have just adjusted for that, touched up the pic.

The fact that you think a  scum bag would be not only competent enough (able to read English top begin with), but also stupid enough to waste his time watching TEA where there is only one frog posting (regularly), thinking it was the most efficient way to find a target, is adorable. I love you all   

If I do get burglered, no it's not a word apparently, says firefox, it's gonna be the tech who fixed my ADSL box yesterday, of course. He obviously had no choice but see all my stuff, if just so he could try not to trip on it whilst finding his way to the ADSL box...

No need to burglarise (is that a word?) you. I could now order 50 Pizzas at that Pizza place in your village and have them delivered to your door. Not the worst thing in the world but at least some hassle and embarrasment for you and the Pizzaiolo. You're lucky I don't speak french  .

[Vince]

Nope you could not order any pizza there... because that shop has been dismantled a year or two ago ! 

You can still buy Pizzas there though.... but it's a machine / distributor only. Stick your credit card in, press a few buttons on the tactile screen and it gives you a pizza....

There is another Pizza shop, I mean equipped with human being not just a Windows PC, at the other end of the village.

From what I hear it's just as shit as the other defunct shop.

I can't say for myself since I have never been desperate enough to buy a pizza anywhere just yet. No matter how much or how little they would charge me, it would still be way overpriced for what it is, and contain disgusting bottom of the barrel cheap ingredients, because business is business.


OK now time to get out and drive down town to give that shitty 4G box back to the Telco it belonged to. They still charged me 19 Euros for unsubscribing though, just because all French telcos rip you off. They said it was a " Technical charge ". Yes, call it what you want... it's just a legal way to steal money from people even when they fucking leave you. Telco here should spend more time and effort providing the service they advertise and charge you for, and less time trying to find legal ways to steal your money for no good reason.
But that's OK, they can take my 19 Euros... it's the last cent

they will ever get from me, I hope they will make good use of it.... straight to their shareholders pockets rather than improving their infrastructure for sure 

[AVGresponding]

burglarise (is that a word?)

Yes.

[david77]

.....

tough.... but it's a machine / distributor only. Stick your credit card in, press a few buttons on the tactile screen and it gives you a pizza....

....

I'm half Italian but even the German half is disgusted at the thought of a Pizza machine 

[Vince]

Yes me too, but I guess some people like it.... here it is. The Google car / Street view has up to date imagery :

[Brumby]

* Cringe *

[med6753]

So slept late today. Sitting here drinking my coffee and reviewing the last 12 hours or so of the thread. And smiling. In fact I'm down right giddy.



I disconnected the fan from the 7904 +15V supply and connected to an hp 6215A. See results. Scope is happier than a wallowing pig. So I have a decision to make. Cobble together an external supply or trash the whole idea of a cooling fan. I'm sure I have everything I need including a small transformer and there's room in the scope itself. Haven't made up my mind yet. But yea, the fan definitely wasn't appreciated by the scope's circuitry. More later.




Vindication is a bitch. Vindication is mine. ----Not famous nor noteworthy. Just an ordinary schmuck.  

[med6753]

Yes me too, but I guess some people like it.... here it is. The Google car / Street view has up to date imagery :

I thought the French were proud of their cuisine. That is an abomination. 

[ch_scr]

So slept late today. Sitting here drinking my coffee and reviewing the last 12 hours or so of the thread. And smiling. In fact I'm down right giddy.



I disconnected the fan from the 7904 +15V supply and connected to an hp 6215A. See results. Scope is happier than a wallowing pig. So I have a decision to make. Cobble together an external supply or trash the whole idea of a cooling fan. I'm sure I have everything I need including a small transformer and there's room in the scope itself. Haven't made up my mind yet. But yea, the fan definitely wasn't appreciated by the scope's circuitry. More later.




Vindication is a bitch. Vindication is mine. ----Not famous nor noteworthy. Just an ordinary schmuck.

Med, build an RC dropper / filter to put in series with the fan from a higher supply. That simple R-C circuit is A LOT better at supressing those transients than a voltage reg, and can be tuned by adding capacitance until the voltage rail is happy again. No need to go fully seperate, just isolate the transients.
Edit:
Take a TRMS capable DMM on it's current range in series with the fan to measure the effective current drawn "I". If you have e.g. a 18V rail and a 12V fan, the voltage drop across the resistor is "E"=6V. The needed resistor equals R = E / I. It has to dissipate P = E * I. Pick capacitance big enough (should be 1000uF or more) until you see no more ripple on the 18V  and you're good to go!

[Cerebus]

I suspect this is my situation as well, although the conditions in the first sentence do not fit.  We are on the maximum length of copper.  Due to variations in weather, I also suspect the copper may not be in the greatest of shape and the insulation of it may be compromised.

Ia any part of your line up in the air on a catenary wire? Overhead cabling, even in good condition, is affected in poor weather. I used to have customers calling in for support laugh if I asked "Is it raining where you are?" but I've seen the phenomenon so often that I'm in no doubt that it's real.

DSL pushes the boundaries of what it is possible to stuff down a copper twisted pair that, crucially, is bundled without shielding with lots of other copper pairs. When DSL was first being mooted I remember a lot of engineers saying that it would be impossible to get the 2 Mbit of ADSL down a copper pair that was typically thought of as having about 6kHz bandwidth, and noisy at that. It's no surprise that if you alter the conditions then what will successfully pass over the line varies.

Of course, the other shady practices of ISPs that Vince described are well known to happen here in the GWN.  Some of which are plainly written into the contracts that ISPs provide, although I feel like I am the only person who read that far (even I did not read the whole contract...).

Maximum return on investment = getting away with sub-par service

One can't entirely shovel the blame on the ISP's greed. Back when I had to make the decisions whether it was commercially viable to establish a new point of presence somewhere, and hence had to pay for cable laying work, it cost about £150 a metre to trench and lay [direct burial] cables/fibre in a soft verge, £250 a metre to lay cabling under a pavement (sidewalk), and £500 a metre to lay cabling under a metalled road (prices circa 2000AD).You can nearly double those prices for ducting. That adds up very quickly. A back of envelope calculation says that just to get fibre/cabling from a mid street cabinet to every one of the roughly 50 houses in my road would cost £92,500. That's without backhaul anywhere. That's £1850 per house (2000 prices) before you've blow any fibre or paid for any electronics.

Add hardware, backhaul and operating costs and it's pretty easy to see that the ROI isn't very attractive. If you're competing with an incumbent who wrote down their street plant (buried cable) costs years ago and hence can set unrealisticly low prices you're stuffed.

[Saskia]

my PZsgot here today.
Appartment sale notarized.
stepmom near death. going to see her one last time. do not expect to be on discord tomorrow.

[Cerebus]

It's the older rural and rural-ish stuff, and low income neighbourhoods that causes headaches, and I suspect that Vince may fall into this hole. They don't want to go to the expense of the fibre rollouts that 'modern' broadband needs, when a fiber pull to a cabinet may only be serving a handful of dwellings - lots of capital expenditure for a handful of customers. So you get what Vince's situation sounds like where you're still on copper for 5km or more to get to a place where enough customer's circuits can be concentrated into that they deem it economic to pull fibre to.

Nto sure what you mean ? I did say that I have got fiber in the street, fiber cabinet located in my very street, exchange only 1km away, down my street + a few meters. See map below.

I misremembered what you'd said, I though the 1km you'd mentioned was to a flexible interconnect point where they'd found another 'splice' to be redone, not to the exchange.

[Cerebus]

Nto sure what you mean ? I did say that I have got fiber in the street, fiber cabinet located in my very street, exchange only 1km away, down my street + a few meters. See map below.

It's all very new, so as I said 90+ of the houses in my street are not connect-able to the fiber : the fiber has been

...

You might want to delete this pic. The whole internet knows where you live now.

Too late. I'm pretty sure that Saskia has GPS coordinates, local contours for terrain following, and calculated CEPs for all of us, just in case. 

[Vince]

Well I don't mind TEA gang coming here, it's just that the house and yard are tiny so would not be much fun.

Saskia is most welcome here, for she could bring me all her nice Festool gear, as well as big knives, sabers, heavy caliber machine guns, and rocketry, to defend my house.   

[mnementh]

Yes me too, but I guess some people like it.... here it is. The Google car / Street view has up to date imagery :

I thought the French were proud of their cuisine. That is an abomination. 

Yeah, on this point even I have to agree with med... there is no other word for that thing. It is an affront to the food gods.

mnem
I think I hear Demeter and Dionysus right now talking Thor into a well-placed lightning bolt...

[Cerebus]

...
If I do get burglered, no it's not a word apparently, says firefox,...

"Burgled", or perhaps "burglarised", was the word you were looking for there. I'm not 100% sure, but the latter may be a recent re-import into standard English from American English.

Ob fact: The British police pronounce the word "burglary" differently from the rest of the population. The standard pronunciation is burg-la-re, go into a police station and listen and you'll hear coppers say burg-ul-re. I have no idea why, but what is a mispronunciation has become socialised to the normal pronunciation among the police themselves, at least in the south of England where I've spent significant time inside police stations; working, not in the cells.

[mnementh]

my PZsgot here today. Appartment sale notarized. stepmom near death. going to see her one last time. do not expect to be on discord tomorrow.

ghaaah. Life just does not stop piling on, does it? 

Of course you have other priorities than carousing with a bunch of misfits online. Safe travels, and I hope you find closure where you need to.

mnem

[Vince]

Yes me too, but I guess some people like it.... here it is. The Google car / Street view has up to date imagery :

[img width= 250]https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/?action=dlattach;attach=1447726;image[/img]

I thought the French were proud of their cuisine. That is an abomination. 

Well there is no pride involved here, Pizza are not French at all, who cares about Pizzas here ?! 
I would care about Pizza mahcines if I went ot visit Italy and could not anything but Pizza machines and no actual pizza shop ! That would concern me.

But Pizzas in France, could not care less what they are like 

I don't think Zucca would come in France and expect to have the best pizzas in the world at every street corjner in France, doesn't make sense to me... just like I don't tihnk a Britt comes to France expecting to find in every shop, the best Marmite jar he has ever tasted... because we don't do Marmite here, not even our pigs would eat it, tehy would go on strike and refuse to be sliced if we dared feeding him the stuff.

Just like when I was living in England I hardly expected to find a good baguette or good cheese or anything really.. and I was not disappointed in this regard, it lived up to my total lack of expectations ! 

So I say, every country is responsible for their own shit / specialty, no less, but no more 

Besides, even if French cared about Pizzas, you can stop having ONE SINGLE man out of the millions living here, from being a greedy businessmen seeing a market / business opportunity.

Just like we have American fast food shit all over the place, McDonald and the like... does not mean we don't also have our more traditional good restaurants here and there....

It's a diverse world, one can chose to look at the crap or the good, depending on his taste and preferences...

[Cerebus]

Now that I have put a curtain, I have not made any new friends 

I have this mental vision of you trying to reverse the trend by removing the curtains. I can see a figure like a middle aged Gérard Depardieu, standing naked, stretching behind your windows, scaring off dogs and small children.