Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

Well to quell my disappointment, the first lot arrived:



Several whole drawers of dual PNP and NPN transistors. Now I can make my own ICs 

[RolandK]

idk wtf is going on, I bid 88.88, which was the winning bid, but somehow I'm not the winner? Fuck ebay, I'm done.

did someone else bid the same 88.88 but before you? Then the first bidder gets it. Had you set 88.89 it would be yours. Or sometimes you loose somtime the others win

[med6753]

Well to quell my disappointment, the first lot arrived:



Several whole drawers of dual PNP and NPN transistors. Now I can make my own ICs 

You are on my "go to" list if I need a vintage transistor. 

[mnementh]

idk wtf is going on, I bid 88.88, which was the winning bid, but somehow I'm not the winner? Fuck ebay, I'm done.

did someone else bid the same 88.88 but before you? Then the first bidder gets it. Had you set 88.89 it would be yours. Or sometimes you loose somtime the others win

Yes, sadly... bidding "clever amounts" like this can bite you in the arse. You're not the only one who likes to be clever. 

If it's something you really want, then dig deep; until it hurts. That way when someone tops you by one copper, you can honestly say to yourself "It was too fucking much".

mnem
 

[BU508A]

idk wtf is going on, I bid 88.88, which was the winning bid, but somehow I'm not the winner? Fuck ebay, I'm done.

did someone else bid the same 88.88 but before you? Then the first bidder gets it. Had you set 88.89 it would be yours. Or sometimes you loose somtime the others win

That is exactly what happened. The highest bids were £88,88.
User 9***2 placed it at 17 Aug 2022, 18:28:17 MESZ.
User 2***z placed it at 17 Aug 2022, 18:28:21 MESZ, four seconds later.
If user 2***z would have placed it five seconds earlier or if he'd placed it as £88,89, then he'd won the auction.

Screenshot:

[SoundTech-LG]

Any 2N5583 you are trying to get rid of??? 

[AVGresponding]

idk wtf is going on, I bid 88.88, which was the winning bid, but somehow I'm not the winner? Fuck ebay, I'm done.

did someone else bid the same 88.88 but before you? Then the first bidder gets it. Had you set 88.89 it would be yours. Or sometimes you loose somtime the others win

That is exactly what happened. The highest bids were £88,88.
User 9***2 placed it at 17 Aug 2022, 18:28:17 MESZ.
User 2***z placed it at 17 Aug 2022, 18:28:21 MESZ, four seconds later.
If user 2***z would have placed it five seconds earlier or if he'd placed it as £88,89, then he'd won the auction.

Screenshot:

My bid was accepted, and was winning when I entered it; ebay lag fucked me over, basically.

[Per Hansson]

Found the restoring video of this thing: it is an HP 150A:

Thanks for posting that, I did watch the first part some time ago and skipped through most of it, as sanding & painting it was not very interesting to me, plus he painted the wrong color. 
Watched the other three parts last night, much better
David

Thank you so much for the link, just like you I had seen only the first episode but got a bit put off by it, now I watched the rest and they where quite good!
They did achieve one other thing for me: I'm totally put off buying a vacuum tube oscilloscope after seeing all that, I would not have the patience to repair such a beast!

And just as mansaxel writes here below another good reason is the electricity prices!
Currently as I'm writing this it's almost at 10SEK or around 90€/$ cents including taxes!!!

At least it has motivated me to setup a Home Assistant module that shuts off my water heater, and come winter when heating will be required the heater too based on hourly electricity rates:

Now at 56 c/kWh. This is bloody insane.

Do you pay hourly rate or is it a generic high level? The peak prices were around those levels today, or even a bit higher, in SE4, the southernmost part of Sweden. Thankfully, we're in SE3, which is a little bit cheaper. (source: Nordpool)

I'm very much on the fence as to how I'm going to tackle next 12-month period; which agreement model I'm choosing, fixed, semi-rigid or full-floating. Full-floating requires instrumentation and some consumer control too. Tempting but do I have the drive to fix it what with the other 100s of things I need to do?  As someone wrote; "The dream of renewables in Germany mostly was natural gas through NordStream..."

Topic discussion: Old TE is energy inefficient. Having large power costs influences the Addiction. Besides, electricity is sort of on-topic.  I hope.

[bd139]

idk wtf is going on, I bid 88.88, which was the winning bid, but somehow I'm not the winner? Fuck ebay, I'm done.

did someone else bid the same 88.88 but before you? Then the first bidder gets it. Had you set 88.89 it would be yours. Or sometimes you loose somtime the others win

That is exactly what happened. The highest bids were £88,88.
User 9***2 placed it at 17 Aug 2022, 18:28:17 MESZ.
User 2***z placed it at 17 Aug 2022, 18:28:21 MESZ, four seconds later.
If user 2***z would have placed it five seconds earlier or if he'd placed it as £88,89, then he'd won the auction.

Screenshot:

Interestingly my bid isn’t even in there.

[Saskia]

ok, re electricity and heating ... gas price hike has arrived, too.
so, anything taking up energy and generating heat will be moved to our upper level where we have no gas heating.
We will turn to wood for our normal ground level heating.
Solar power will be installed.
Chainsaw petrol and oil will be bunkered.

Next step: go for big island configuration, talk to carpenter about setting up a new carport solar panel mount which has the best possible orientation towards the sun. investigate island configuration.

For the shtf scenario the emergency water purifier arrived today.
This country is going 3rd world ... 

Other news:
3d printing an 18650 crate.
The filament is old and has not been stored properly. I raised the temp to 210 C for the AAA crate and the thickness from 0.1 to 0.2 mil.
Trying to get thru this filament as it has been sitting on the reel in the open for the past 6 months without getting put to use.
And my RTX3090 TUF OC has arrived. Just picked it up @135€forthenext10months

Additional info: 3090 seem to be on the phase-out list. The next generation is waiting to hit the market, and the 3090ti has also dropped significantly while the 3090 dropped 30% in price.
I wanted 2 of those so I can throw them together into a 48GB pacman server ...

[bd139]

3090 going cheap now because no one can afford to run them 

[Saskia]

that was my first thought as well. However since our natural gas prices are level with juice prices now it really does not matter. Furthermore, the 3090 is the perfect heater. You won't reach that efficiency level with any other juice->heat generator

[Zenith]

ok, re electricity and heating ... gas price hike has arrived, too.
so, anything taking up energy and generating heat will be moved to our upper level where we have no gas heating.
We will turn to wood for our normal ground level heating.
Solar power will be installed.
Chainsaw petrol and oil will be bunkered.

Don't forget to put fuel stabiliser in your chainsaw petrol. Don't use that high alcohol E10 rubbish - unless you go to the trouble of removing the ethanol.

Premix is about twice the price of petrol at the pumps, but comes with stabiliser and two stroke oil mixed in. It keeps better and doesn't contain the additives intended for cars, but undesirable in two stroke fuel.  Maybe worth considering in spite of the cost.

[tggzzz]

ok, re electricity and heating ... gas price hike has arrived, too.
so, anything taking up energy and generating heat will be moved to our upper level where we have no gas heating.
We will turn to wood for our normal ground level heating.
Solar power will be installed.
Chainsaw petrol and oil will be bunkered.

Don't forget to put fuel stabiliser in your chainsaw petrol. Don't use that high alcohol E10 rubbish - unless you go to the trouble of removing the ethanol.

Premix is about twice the price of petrol at the pumps, but comes with stabiliser and two stroke oil mixed in. It keeps better and doesn't contain the additives intended for cars, but undesirable in two stroke fuel.  Maybe worth considering in spite of the cost.

Or the traditional technique. Cows in the ground floor byre, people on the first floor. Cows convert inedible grass into both heat and fuel - and food

[Specmaster]

idk wtf is going on, I bid 88.88, which was the winning bid, but somehow I'm not the winner? Fuck ebay, I'm done.

did someone else bid the same 88.88 but before you? Then the first bidder gets it. Had you set 88.89 it would be yours. Or sometimes you loose somtime the others win

That is exactly what happened. The highest bids were £88,88.
User 9***2 placed it at 17 Aug 2022, 18:28:17 MESZ.
User 2***z placed it at 17 Aug 2022, 18:28:21 MESZ, four seconds later.
If user 2***z would have placed it five seconds earlier or if he'd placed it as £88,89, then he'd won the auction.

Screenshot:

My bid was accepted, and was winning when I entered it; ebay lag fucked me over, basically.

Well you did say that with the mobile app it would save you money, so this is the start of that process.

[mnementh]

      

WAF Improvement Project is now in endgame... but of course the weather is killing me. 

Went to glue these uprights after curing in the sun, and when I came back it was raining on the lock wedges.  They're now in my air fryer on a dehydrate cycle to dry so I can polyurethane them for final assembly.

TE used: Air Fryer thermometer and humidity sensor. 

mnem
This is real life. Of course there will be a test.

[factory]

Any 2N5583 you are trying to get rid of??? 

Those are in the next lot (zero interest from me on that lot) and I didn't bid at all on the second lot, was too busy engaged in TETRIS, to get the HP 404A voltmeter near the 711A power supply.



Yesterday I corrected the wonky needle problem  , it might still be knackered, as the zero adjust needs to be set all the way to one side, the plastic pin is broken off too, so it can't adjusted now it's back together. If I need to buy another complete meter movement I will.





Also reattached this broken off resistor, used the wrap some tinned copper wire around a drill bit technique, to make a joiner.





Is it safe to leave these leak-tubes in overnight? 



David

[bd139]

Yeah next lot is a pass for me as well.

[nfmax]

idk wtf is going on, I bid 88.88, which was the winning bid, but somehow I'm not the winner? Fuck ebay, I'm done.

did someone else bid the same 88.88 but before you? Then the first bidder gets it. Had you set 88.89 it would be yours. Or sometimes you loose somtime the others win

Yes, sadly... bidding "clever amounts" like this can bite you in the arse. You're not the only one who likes to be clever. 

If it's something you really want, then dig deep; until it hurts. That way when someone tops you by one copper, you can honestly say to yourself "It was too fucking much".

mnem
 

The correct amount to bid is that at which you will be equally unhappy whether you win or lose

[Saskia]

pv mount on its way over here. Will do one string first and check on max cable length for HM-1500. Will also try to frickledoodle a DTU to check effectiveness (the HM dtu has been, umm, reengineered ...)

on 23rd the carpenter wants to stop by to check the place for this particular car port that we had in mind.
Will try to max out what I can get out of the PV and look into an island solution.
Unfortunately over here battery packs need to be certified or in case of an oopsie there is absolutely no insurance coverage ... (and I cannot have that ...)

[Saskia]

re bidding and temptation. There is a Naka CR7 up on Catawiki. I am tempted.

[m k]

What are you talking about? My post was about a mod to a bench meter, and all the other discussion has been about visiting a hamfest... all very much on-topic. 
mnem
*SMH*

I think he's refereing to BD139's post above with the embedded video that has no relevance.
It's one thing to reply with a short fun quip, it's another to embed a video as clog up the page.

What are the priorities of this thread today?
Slower connection friendliness is clearly one but it probably is not the first.

Show window can be one also but how smoothly that would sink in to the content suppliers.

[tautech]

Chainsaw petrol and oil will be bunkered.

Please take on this 40+yrs of experience.
Fuel and 2 stoke oils

Do not under any circumstances use a heavily dyed oil even for the benefit of 2 stroke mix identification.
Use air cooled rated oils for air cooled motors.
Do not use 2 stroke oils at minimum ratios ever ! The low % of lubricant in a fuel mix leaves very little room for error and errors run the motor short of oil which is a costly lesson. Regardless of oil type, mineral blend or synthetic stay richer than 40:1 always. I run most everything at 32:1 using quality lightly dyed mineral 2 stroke oils and the big boy 120cc saw that works the hardest is run on 25:1.
Highest octane fuels will provide highest power output and highest flash off vapors that can build up fuel tank pressure and override carburetor needle valve fuel control.
Always leave fuel in saw tanks if they are to be used again within a 6 month period. < Translation, don't store your saw with an empty tank.

Following the above will provide decades of trouble free service if you do your part with the little things....clean fuel, clean air filter clear air cooling paths etc.

/lecture.

[Robert763]

Got around to doing some more checks on the newly aquired Fluke 8845A DMM. Looking good against my LTZ1000ACH based 10V reference, ESi SR1010 on 200 Ohms and a 1k secondardy standard.  The trending and statistics funcions look nice too.

[Saskia]

@tautech will go for that specialized premix husqvarna certified mix that does cost a bit more but comes without all those pesky additives good for the road but bad for the woods ...