Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mansaxel]

The only hope one has of reducing one's assault exposure profile is the fact that the carrier's network is their lifeblood, so they have a dollars and cents interest in keeping your individual connection mostly clean and not exposed directly to the internet without the same prophylacytic filters they use themselves.

I don't think we can count on the carrier working for you in that context. (especially not in the North America market, where telcos have been given much more leverage to exploit their customers than here.)  Better then, if there's a choice, to network the phone via infrastructure you control and can monitor.  Good luck, for instance, keeping DNS lookups out of marketing hands if you're on the LTE connection. If you are on your own wifi, you can run your own full-service resolver that talks to the root servers.  (the joke that is DoH is something I'm not even condescending to talk about. *barf*)  All other wifi networks of course are off-limits. If there's "free wifi", it's because your traffic is the product.  I'd be OK running a VPN I control myself over that, nothing else.

or give up

[Specmaster]

Well, if the pound stays weak vs USD and the vaccine gets Covid under control expect London this coming Summer to be over run with Yankee tourists. I pity you. 

Don't worry on our account, me and BD have a whole bunch of bridges to sell to them. 

Hey, can I join in on this venture 

[bd139]

Well, if the pound stays weak vs USD and the vaccine gets Covid under control expect London this coming Summer to be over run with Yankee tourists. I pity you. 

Don't worry on our account, me and BD have a whole bunch of bridges to sell to them. 

Hey, can I join in on this venture 

I can sell you a promise on a piece of paper that can be exchanged for fiat currency but not until some arbitrary point in the future after the bridges are delivered 

[factory]

This is about to be taken downstairs and put through its paces.



The idea is to pair this scope with the Heathkit semiconductor curve tracer I picked up in the fall from the pawn shop and make a test station out of the two of them.  Every Tektronix curve tracer I’ve come across has been priced well above what I can afford so until the time comes that I’m in the right place at the right time, this should work well.

It did make me stop and think though about how much volume of air in my house is displaced by vacuum tubes though.  Air displaced by vacuum contained in electronics was normal in most houses for a period of time spanning from when radios became a common household item through the end of CRT televisions, and is now uncommon once again.

Nice choice with the HP 130C, my Heathkit curve tracer gets used with the ex-British Rail HP 140A*, the X-Y 1405A module I use with it came from the US years ago, it needs a bit of warm up time to stop the trace drifting.



More replacement tunnel diode testing for the HP 5248M. 


*Maybe I'll put the original CRT back in it one day, currently has the 140S CRT fitted.

David

[mansaxel]

I think you'll find that range extenders are half duplex at best, I tried one to boost the signal to my doorbell video camera, sited it just 1 metre away, linked to an access point just 6 metres away, total waste of time. Replaced it with a power link adaptor next to the main router, Ethernet lead to the adaptor and plugged in power link access point 1 metre away from camera, perfect max signal strength, no more problems.

Range extenders are shit. The only reliable way to build a wifi that can stand modern clients and their appetite for parallel video stream downloads is to put cabled access points everywhere there's people, and then move everything that really needs to work off the wireless. If it is bolted to or hung on the wall, it bloody well can have a cable run to it.

[bd139]

Right it’s officially 2021 here and about five ambulances have gone past in the last 5 minutes 

Happy new year everyone and I’m going to bed now 

[Specmaster]

I think you'll find that range extenders are half duplex at best, I tried one to boost the signal to my doorbell video camera, sited it just 1 metre away, linked to an access point just 6 metres away, total waste of time. Replaced it with a power link adaptor next to the main router, Ethernet lead to the adaptor and plugged in power link access point 1 metre away from camera, perfect max signal strength, no more problems.

Range extenders are shit. The only reliable way to build a wifi that can stand modern clients and their appetite for parallel video stream downloads is to put cabled access points everywhere there's people, and then move everything that really needs to work off the wireless. If it is bolted to or hung on the wall, it bloody well can have a cable run to it.

Agreed, that was my finding also.

[Specmaster]

Right it’s officially 2021 here and about five ambulances have gone past in the last 5 minutes 

Happy new year everyone and I’m going to bed now 

I won't be that far behind you either. Happy New Year everyone.

[tautech]

Right it’s officially 2021 here and about five ambulances have gone past in the last 5 minutes 

Happy new year everyone and I’m going to bed now 

1pm here and just had lunch and as it's pretty hot might just start on the 

Sleep tight. 

[Specmaster]

Well, if the pound stays weak vs USD and the vaccine gets Covid under control expect London this coming Summer to be over run with Yankee tourists. I pity you. 

Don't worry on our account, me and BD have a whole bunch of bridges to sell to them. 

Hey, can I join in on this venture 

I can sell you a promise on a piece of paper that can be exchanged for fiat currency but not until some arbitrary point in the future after the bridges are delivered 

Thought so, thats much like a chocolate fireguard that then 

[factory]

Looking good  . It’s nice to see some Racal kit on here. It’s a rarity.

This time 12 months ago I only had two Racal counters the 836 & SA520, the 836 needs looking at again as it failed last year, last time it was both tants for the external probe socket power supply. 

Since then I have added a 9024, SA540 & SA505A and the 9839 that I've just finished repairing.

   Finally ready to use, the front trim was swapped from top/bottom after straightening, new cap for the sensitivity knob fitted (Elma).

David

Looking good; a fine way to wash the taste of 2020 out of your mouth! 

mnem

I'm very happy with the result, considering what a state it was in when I acquired it. 

David

P.S. Looks like post #666 for the new year. 

[Cubdriver]

Is there a page limit? Are we in danger of breaking the forum? 

Not for a long time, I have done a lot to ensure the forum is scalable.

So you're saying we're not trying hard enough?   

-Pat

[Cerebus]

Right it’s officially 2021 here and about five ambulances have gone past in the last 5 minutes 

Happy new year everyone and I’m going to bed now 

Judging from the amount of ordnance I was just watching through the rear window being fired off the burns units are going to have a busy night. I don't think I've seen so much smoke floating through the air since my childhood when it seemed that everybody was outside trying to reenact WWII every Nov 5th.

I too wish you all a "Happy and Prosperous New Year" and I'm also going to shortly toddle off to the land of cosy duvets and women with frozen feet.

[25 CPS]

That's okay... the expansion of air heated by those vacuum choobs and their kilowatts of power supply more than made up for that lost volume.

That looks like it'll be a fun "little" lab corner. Glad I'm not paying your 'lectric bill.

mnem
tzzzt.

With the amount of use my workshop's been getting, it's barely nudges the hydro meter along.  And that's truly unfortunate.  I miss doing my own thing down there and I've got a bunch of projects I need to get moving on.  That's one of the things I'm going to make a point of in the new year is actually spending time working on stuff I enjoy.

If my 60+ vacuum tube Type 535A won't make my apartment uncomfortably warm then you're golden with that hp.

Just turn the room thermostat down a few degrees. 

It's in the basement so it's cooler down there year round, so it's no problem!  One of these days, I'd love to get an antique tube Tek but that's another thing I just have not been in the right place at the right time for so far.  The closest thing I have is that HP 523D counter with the vertical windows which has 64 or 65 tubes inside.  350 watts to run that counter!

Anyways, happy new year everyone and good riddance to 2020, all 366 leap year days of it.

[Cubdriver]

This curve tracer talk makes me want to dig into my 575 - something is amiss as it puts little turds about a centimeter from the ends of the outbound traces.  Probably power supply related as it hasn't been touched.



2021 resolution - get things organized and excavate the bench!

-Pat

[Cerebus]

Well, if the pound stays weak vs USD and the vaccine gets Covid under control expect London this coming Summer to be over run with Yankee tourists. I pity you. 

Don't worry on our account, me and BD have a whole bunch of bridges to sell to them. 

Hey, can I join in on this venture 

I can sell you a promise on a piece of paper that can be exchanged for fiat currency but not until some arbitrary point in the future after the bridges are delivered 

Thought so, thats much like a chocolate fireguard that then 

Well squire, I can upgrade them to steel, well steely coloured metal, well definitely metal, for another $10 each, and at that price I'm cutting my own throat. D'you want a sausage inna bun while you think it over?

[Saskia]

Happy new year and happy release from  the shackles that the central committee of the union of the european socialist states had put on you.

[SilverSolder]

Happy new year and happy release from  the shackles that the central committee of the union of the european socialist states had put on you.

I will think about it every time I fill in a customs form!   

Happy New Year 

[mnementh]

Oh hell yeah, just had loads of gammon letting off fireworks at 11:00pm in celebration of Brexit  It seems as if a lot of people take delight in pissing on their children's futures by removing all the benefits they had as EU members because the older folk want to return to the dark ages as if they were great or something 

Yup, that's the Conservative voter here; desperately trying to claw our way back from the 21st Century to the Victorian Age, when (Caucasian) men were men and women were chattel...

mnem
But hey... we knew where our furs were.

[Neomys Sapiens]

Happy new year to the TEA crew! Keep safe and measure!

[mnementh]

The only hope one has of reducing one's assault exposure profile is the fact that the carrier's network is their lifeblood, so they have a dollars and cents interest in keeping your individual connection mostly clean and not exposed directly to the internet without the same prophylacytic filters they use themselves.

I don't think we can count on the carrier working for you in that context. (especially not in the North America market, where telcos have been given much more leverage to exploit their customers than here.)  Better then, if there's a choice, to network the phone via infrastructure you control and can monitor.  Good luck, for instance, keeping DNS lookups out of marketing hands if you're on the LTE connection. If you are on your own wifi, you can run your own full-service resolver that talks to the root servers.  (the joke that is DoH is something I'm not even condescending to talk about. *barf*)  All other wifi networks of course are off-limits. If there's "free wifi", it's because your traffic is the product.  I'd be OK running a VPN I control myself over that, nothing else.

or give up

THAT is kindof where I was going with that...

At least with that route, I'm not counting on my own weak Kung-Fu and decades-out-of-date CCNA cred to ensure the safety of that drippy little data sponge bleeding packets like a wounded buffalo; I know just enough aboot the IT infrastructure I repair and maintain for a living to be fucking terrified of it. 

At least by limiting my own WiFi access, I can be reasonably certain where most of the leakage vectors are: My carrier and fucking Google. I stay logged out of all Google Services as much as I possibly can, I don't install apps that demand them when they aren't absolutely necessary, and I keep location services turned hard off; even when I'm actually using my GPS I use offline maps unless I'm going downtown and need live traffic data.

I get where you're coming from and I agree; but I'm a user, not a Network Admin anymore. I don't have the energy for the eternal vigilance you're advocating here; that shit is a young man's game, like I was a couple decades ago taking my Computer Forensics courses at Alamo City CC...

So now I keep my own and my wife's PC on hardline, I use my VPN and a completely different browser when I need to do anything financial, and I treat my own WiFi (even tho I do keep it on a different untrusted subnet and use MAC Address Filtering) as if it were the WiFi at McD's: full of cooties and shitcocks looking to assrape me.

Actually, right now I even have both our Windoze installs configured as PUBLIC with Discovery disabled just in case, as we have no network storage right now. Even our Rokus are on their own VPN when connected to WiFi.

It's an imperfect solution; I'm sure full of holes. But I have no delusions that I'm going to keep out a determined hacker or leech. I just wanna make the script-kiddies roll on and look for lower-hanging fruit.

mnem

[25 CPS]

Nice choice with the HP 130C, my Heathkit curve tracer gets used with the ex-British Rail HP 140A*, the X-Y 1405A module I use with it came from the US years ago, it needs a bit of warm up time to stop the trace drifting.



More replacement tunnel diode testing for the HP 5248M. 


*Maybe I'll put the original CRT back in it one day, currently has the 140S CRT fitted.

David

That's a nice looking stack of HP gear there!  What was the reason for switching out the CRT?  I'm kind of curious if you happen to know what kind of work the lab at British Railways was doing that it came from.  It's always interesting to hear what the history of vintage equipment like this is, where it came from and a rough idea of what it was being used for but it's pretty uncommon, at least in my experience, to know what the background is since older equipment's usually changed hands several times by the time it gets to me.  Unfortunately that's the case with the 130C and I don't know what the story behind it is.

I have a Tektronix 7704A that came from a medical equipment repair business that replaced it with a Siglent and a Tektronix 7633 that came with a scopemobile that was in the maintenance shop at the Kellogg's factory down in London, Ontario that was left behind when they closed the plant down and move it to Mexico.

Oh hell yeah, just had loads of gammon letting off fireworks at 11:00pm in celebration of Brexit  It seems as if a lot of people take delight in pissing on their children's futures by removing all the benefits they had as EU members because the older folk want to return to the dark ages as if they were great or something 

I think my favourite quote regarding Brexit was from one of the newspapers was from a lady in her twenties who said she'd never give up her seat on the train again for the elderly after this.  I have to say I understand.  One of my relatives is a major Brexiter who has delusions that the empire's going to return the moment the exit is complete and he doesn't understand that the British empire is long, long gone and not coming back.  Given that, he's effectively pushing for the worst of both worlds but at his age, he's not going to be around to see it beyond the next couple of years and he's certainly well past the point of being adversely affected by it personally so he doesn't care.  I understand the sentiment, after being thrown under the wheels by old fogies like this who aren't going to be around to endure the damage they've caused, it's understandable for sure.

[mnementh]

Yeah... I don't know how I'm going to face my kids when they finally get old enough and educated enough to understand recent history... how can you explain the choice to throw away a working Democratic Republic for a corporatocracy running our entire economy like a multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme?

My only defense is that I've spent 4 decades fighting to good fight against the Yuppie Dream; being politically active since I was 12 literally going door-to-door and actually giving my own money to the cause.

I hope that'll be enough; I see the blind pro-corporate right-wingnut infection creeping Northward up here already. I fear I may have moved too little North too late.

mnem
But... I can't stand it any colder; my fire will go out!

[VK5RC]

2020, the year that this thread hit 3136 pages... crazy

Just did the DB query...

78,379 posts in total

Is there a page limit? Are we in danger of breaking the forum? 

Not for a long time, I have done a lot to ensure the forum is scalable.

Thanks for the 'behind the scenes' work👍

All the best for 2021 to TEAs, may your magic smoke stay inside, and the Covid vaccine/s work well, so life can go on!

[mnementh]

One of the things we got in our $700 COSTCO run was some bubbly grape and apple juices; we're just wrapping up our Monopoly game (my son won again - I've taught him too well ) and even the little grrl is still up, singing Christmas songs... In a half-hour we'll toast the last dregs of together... looking forward with fear and hope.

Best to all of my TEA Family; may each and every one of us find our Alderaan this year!

mnem