Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Cerebus]

We weren't allowed to assign blame to people because it created a bad working environment apparently. The company used The Dilbert Principle as the operations manual.

Ah, that sort of place. So probably loaded with buzz words, that half the people using them don't understand and don't want to admit they don't understand. Just get someone to sign off on a chit for "fostering improved staff training and understanding with a dynamic kinetic environment in trans-fenestral situations".

PHB: "You what!?! You threw him out of the window!?!"
BD139: "You signed off on it..."

From that I presume you are aware of Simon Travaglia's BOFH series.

Yes, and I suspect that I was in there on the birth of the BOFH meme. The first usage of "BOFH" I encountered was on Cix* which had a topic called BOFH started, if I remember correctly, by Piers in which Simon was a regular contributor.

*Cix (formerly the Compulink Information eXchange) was the precursor to the internet for the UK techie community. It started as a dial-up FIDO bulletin board and shareware distribution service in the mid eighties, moved to its own platform a few years later and sowed the seeds of its own partial demise (it is still going) by hosting the "tenner a month" topic in which Cliff Stanford got a bunch of people to commit to spending £10 a month for dial-up internet connectivity and thus Demon Internet was born - so also probably the first crowdfunding campaign.

[Cerebus]

I've now come to realize i have alot of trans-fenestral urges particularly directed towards the DUD.

Also, when the going gets tough, you can autodefenestrate* and have it light on your heels.

*My favourite word and this is the second time this week I have had a good excuse to use it.

[Mr. Scram]

Shucks. I was looking at a reasonably priced decade box, but the seller won't ship abroad.

WELL YOUR STUPID BOX WAS UGLY ANYWAY. I DON'T EVEN WANT TO BUY IT!

[bd139]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reasonably priced one!

[Mr. Scram]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reasonably priced one!

Fair point. Let's call it "much less ridiculously priced". The buyer got a great deal, even if the thing was a little beat up.

[Specmaster]

Well who went to the kempton park radio rally and was it any good for bargains? Prior to the event there was a lot of chat about it but nothing since. I just cannot believe that people went and not brought something otherwise we may have to reconsider their continued membership as it might signal that their addiction is cured 

[Mr. Scram]

Well who went to the kempton park radio rally and was it any good for bargains? Prior to the event there was a lot of chat about it but nothing since. I just cannot believe that people went and not brought something otherwise we may have to reconsider their continued membership as it might signal that their addiction is cured 

Maybe a handful of people got crushed under stacks of falling equipment on the way home. You never know.

[Specmaster]

Maybe a handful of people got crushed under stacks of falling equipment on the way home. You never know.

Either that or their being extremely tight lipped about their latest acquisitions which is completely out of character for them. Maybe SWMBO reads this forum as well so they daren't tell us.   

[bd139]

I didn’t go because I was fixing shit one of outsourcers hosed.

Treated myself to a copy of AoE 3rd editon and a new calculator (Casio FX991EX) as compensation.

Profitable day in the end as weekend is charged at silly £ haha.

[Specmaster]

So far only 1 person says that they went and I was so looking forward to hearing about the spoils gathered up. The last one I went to was about 25 years ago in Picketts Lock Centre in Ponders End and I was more into computers then than test gear.

[bd139]

Indeed. I can’t say I wasn’t looking forward to some more crap to play with.

I never went to the Pickets Lock one. Didn’t live that far from it for a few years (Leyton). Was too busy with women then. Should have gone to there instead. Far less trouble in the long run!

[Specmaster]

Well that person did say that saw one person smiling broadly and clutching and a crusty oscilloscope and that sort of conjured up in my mind a mental picture of you with your latest toy to do battle with 

I was toying with the idea of swapping the handle over from the Goldstar scope with the one on the Hitachi, look identical until I measured the width, 20mm difference

The chrome on the Hitachi is all rusty and pitted as it sticks out of the padded case and looks like it has been stored in a slightly damp area, while the scope is mint, as is the Goldstar but it lacks cursors of course.

[tggzzz]

Maybe a handful of people got crushed under stacks of falling equipment on the way home. You never know.

Either that or their being extremely tight lipped about their latest acquisitions which is completely out of character for them. Maybe SWMBO reads this forum as well so they daren't tell us.   

I'm pleased to say I didn't buy anything there, but I did buy a 7 decade KVD afterwards

But things certainly were being sold at Kempton - all the dealers had to do was price them right.

[mnementh]

We weren't allowed to assign blame to people because it created a bad working environment apparently. The company used The Dilbert Principle as the operations manual.

Ah, that sort of place. So probably loaded with buzz words, that half the people using them don't understand and don't want to admit they don't understand. Just get someone to sign off on a chit for "fostering improved staff training and understanding with a dynamic kinetic environment in trans-fenestral situations".

PHB: "You what!?! You threw him out of the window!?!"
BD139: "You signed off on it..."

I always wanted to have a job that would let me put "fenestrate" in my CV... closest I've gotten is doing some steel erection work, where I actually made some pretty high windows.

As an aside, I spoke with Simon a few times, back when The Register still had a UseNet portal that linked to the alts he still haunted from time to time. Much friendlier guy than the BOFH. Still pretty cynical though, which I fully understand given my own history working in corporate environments.

I have 2, they get new batteries every ~3 years and I've had them both for about 15 years - we get lots of little blackouts and and power sags so they keep my servers and comms gear from having the rug pulled out from them. In longer power loss scenarios they allow the servers to shut down gracefully.

Worth every cent to me.

Ps I only buy APC units, they are just bullet proof!

Every UPS I've owned was reclaimed hardware from a de-install. My current one is a first-gen APC SmartUPS 1500 XLM (made back when they didn't count on low-IR AGMs to make their VA ratings, so has a full-size battery cartridge); it is in the living room right by the bigscreen TV and the DOCSIS 3.1 MODEM, Router, AP etc and ONE lamp in the corner of the room with a 9W LED bulb in it. Client replaced the whole unit instead of just the battery; I took it home and found one crusty connector on a battery in the cartridge. Cleaned and retinned the lug, replaced the connector and now it operates showing 95% capacity again.

The headaches of not having a UPS come not from when my PC (or my MPC) in the corner of the room goes down; that happens pretty rarely as both have oversized power supplies with plenty of cap to keep it alive for a second or three. It's that the slightest flicker makes the damned MODEM go down, and then you have to wait for it to reboot, then bind the streams, and then half the time then you have to power cycle the TV and the MPC so they re-establish their connections to streaming video sources like Hulu/NetFlix, etc.

The UPS makes that a thing of the past, plus on the rare occasion the power actually goes out, I have light and TV in the room for hours if I turn off the PCs. Keeps me from having to eat my young in defense of my sanity because they get bored in a dark house with nothing to rot their brains. Next one I get is going on the freezer in the garage. :p


mnem
The moose is loose... Uhh, tighten 'im up a little, willya?

[bitseeker]

Maybe SWMBO reads this forum

That would be the end of life as we know it.

[Berni]

Well just as i thought i got rid of my TEA i happened to come across that wrong side of ebay again...

So i bid and scored a HP 83483A (Dual channel 20GHz Electrical sampling module)



Only issue is that i don't have the HP 83480A (Sampling scope mainframe) to put that plugin module into. So i bought one of those too. It even has Option 100 Enhanced trigger that bumps the trigger bandwidth from 2,5GHz to 15GHz.



Guess my TEA is back on track for a while.

[Cubdriver]

Well just as i thought i got rid of my TEA i happened to come across that wrong side of ebay again...

So i bid and scored a HP 83483A (Dual channel 20GHz Electrical sampling module)

<image snipped to save space>

Only issue is that i don't have the HP 83480A (Sampling scope mainframe) to put that plugin module into. So i bought one of those too. It even has Option 100 Enhanced trigger that bumps the trigger bandwidth from 2,5GHz to 15GHz.

<image snipped to save space>

Guess my TEA is back on track for a while.

Now that there is TEA done right.  Buy the widget, then use the purchase of the widget to justify buying the piece of gear that the widget goes in.  Well done, my good sir!!

 

-Pat

[djos]

Nice, it even has a Sony Trinitron screen! 

[Berni]

Now that there is TEA done right.  Buy the widget, then use the purchase of the widget to justify buying the piece of gear that the widget goes in.  Well done, my good sir!!

 

-Pat

I did do a bit of research beforehand actually. Turns out that these plugin modules are quite rare and very expensive on the used market. A single plugin module can easily go over $1000 and they can easily be damaged by a static zap or too much DC on the inputs. So when i saw a tested one of these bidding i gave it a go and got it for about 550 bucks.

But while these plugin modules are rare as hens teeth its the opposite for the scope mainframe that they fit into. There are a lot of them on ebay and nobody is buying them because you can't get the plugins for them. As a result they sell for better prices and i ended up scoring mine for 190 bucks tho with 120 bucks of shipping on top (Actually that's not so bad given how boatanchory it is)

I think what caused this is that Agilent has made newer modern scope mainframes that are still compatible with these old plugins. Since these plugins are quite capable despite the age the buyers of these newer sampling scopes likely moved some of the plugin modules in to the new scope and tossed out the old scope bare.

[Specmaster]

Now that there is TEA done right.  Buy the widget, then use the purchase of the widget to justify buying the piece of gear that the widget goes in.  Well done, my good sir!!

 

-Pat

I did do a bit of research beforehand actually. Turns out that these plugin modules are quite rare and very expensive on the used market. A single plugin module can easily go over $1000 and they can easily be damaged by a static zap or too much DC on the inputs. So when i saw a tested one of these bidding i gave it a go and got it for about 550 bucks.

But while these plugin modules are rare as hens teeth its the opposite for the scope mainframe that they fit into. There are a lot of them on ebay and nobody is buying them because you can't get the plugins for them. As a result they sell for better prices and i ended up scoring mine for 190 bucks tho with 120 bucks of shipping on top (Actually that's not so bad given how boatanchory it is)

I think what caused this is that Agilent has made newer modern scope mainframes that are still compatible with these old plugins. Since these plugins are quite capable despite the age the buyers of these newer sampling scopes likely moved some of the plugin modules in to the new scope and tossed out the old scope bare.

Nice, with that information you could if you don't really have a need for this, put it together and get it working. Then resell it for even more and use that money to fund more Tea items.


Sent from my SM-J510FN using Tapatalk

[GreyWoolfe]

Was too busy with women then. Should have gone to there instead. Far less trouble in the long run!

Cheaper, too, probably.

[bd139]

Not so sure about that!

[Berni]

Nice, with that information you could if you don't really have a need for this, put it together and get it working. Then resell it for even more and use that money to fund more Tea items.


Sent from my SM-J510FN using Tapatalk

Well we wouldn't be here at TEA if we did that

I have a boatanchor spectrum analyzer that goes to 22GHz so it would be a cool addition to get to the same ballpark in the time domain too. There is no way in hell im getting there with a real time scope so equivalent time sampling is the best i can do.

But i did score three Agilent E3631A (Tripple channel PSU) for 160 bucks at a auction. All of them supposebly broken but if i fix them, keep one and sell the other two it could proabobly cover this sampling scope endevour since they seam to fetch a good price on ebay for some reason. I guess il see if they are really that good to be worth it once i get them.

[bd139]

That’s a good deal. I’m toying with the idea of buying a new E3630 at the moment. About $800 here in the U.K.

[Mr. Scram]

Sniping bastards. I was bidding on a decent looking HP 3457A, and someone outbid me at the last minute. I really don't like that, let's just be men and have a proper bidding war. There's something to be said for auctions that extend the deadline by x after each bid.

I hope it at least went to someone on here.