Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

I’m cooking tonight - so I’m responsible for letting any magic smoke out of that too

[Specmaster]

Could it be a double whammy then?

Edit: At least you can cook, me? I could burn anything in the kitchen. 

[mnementh]

(SNIP)
Talking of Snurch!!!

  just assaulted my cerebral cortex?!? I feel like someone just lobotomized me with a megablast of stoner music-flubbery...

*Does a quick Guugle*

ummm... Okaaaay. Snail Church/Snake Church. Snies. All snies! Snurch is much older than this puerile meme.

It's from Farscape; one of the strange patois of slang words they mixed in with the weird swear words. Means to steal, usually somewhat brazenly. There are a number of threads I frequent where this is still the language of the land.


mnem
Frell me dead!!!

[Specmaster]

Haha, there of course many other meanings of Snurch such as these  , meanings 4 and 5 are gooduns too.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Snurch

[bd139]

Could it be a double whammy then?

Edit: At least you can cook, me? I could burn anything in the kitchen. 

Instead of torching the kitchen, I prefer to kill my victims via atherosclerosis. Extra bacon, because bacon:

[mnementh]

Haha, there of course many other meanings of Snurch such as these  , meanings 4 and 5 are gooduns too.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Snurch

Yeah, but UD is like wikipedia; any imbecile can post an entry. Only far fewer folks bother to review and fact-check it.

I promise you, we did lots of reality checking back in the day; they were pretty much all original memes created by the writers of Farscape. Snurch is one that we researched especially hard; we just couldn't believe there wasn't preexisting slang meaning for it, but there simply wasn't. We spent many evenings on the Farscape and Dominion chats geeking out over these things to the nth degree.

I realize that life moves on, and English is a living language, etc... but for me and a few million of my closest friends, all those memes are posers... stealing what is rightfully OURS. Farscape's use of the word is "the original Slim Shady".


mnem
"Whatcha doing?"
"Oh, I'm having sex with three Hynerian donkeys. Whatzit look like?"

[mnementh]

Could it be a double whammy then?

Edit: At least you can cook, me? I could burn anything in the kitchen. 

Instead of torching the kitchen, I prefer to kill my victims via atherosclerosis. Extra bacon, because bacon:

https://youtu.be/2vnit_xL1hE


Whenever guys talk about bacon, I can't help thinking about this classic ad from my youth... because, no matter how excited they are talking about bacon, there's no way they can understand that THIS is how I REALLY AM about bacon!!! 110% of the time!


mnem
This message brought to you by mnem's "Bits o' Pig" BBQ shack.

[bd139]

That begs the question: if it’s not bacon, what is it and how did they make it look like bacon.

On the matter of TEA, I hope the hell hermes isn’t delivering my voltmeter. Our usual Hermes guy is going mental.

[Specmaster]

Just come across this rather interesting video of a retired electronics engineer being interviewed and he says that the company he worked stopped training apprentices in the 80's which is what I have always said was mainly due to government driven pressure, and when we started exporting our skilled jobs out overseas in the name of greater corporate profits and manufacturing industrial parks slowly become retail parks. You members in the London area may remember the large site at Ponders End which which have the old Creda and Belling factory at the junction of Southbury Road and Great Cambridge Road (A10) along with many other manufacturers, it is now one of the large retail sites with PC World/Currys, Dunelm etc on it. That was the beginning of our shortage of skilled labour which is something that still exists today.

This is not a politics bashing post but an observation and that was the time when the decline and rot in this countries once great and proud heritage started to be leached away in the great "brain drain" and we have never recovered from that. People around the world would once buy British products if they could because it was a given that we made the best products. That torch is now carried on only by a few elite companies like Aim TTi Ltd.

[bd139]

I know round there quite well. Horrible shit hole now but used to be quite respectable.

The problem we have here is there hasn’t been a good war for a while. That drives manufacturing and gets rid of the chaff

[Specmaster]

I used to be a regular visitor to the Belling / Creda factory and a few of the others round when I was a technical sales engineer for Crabtree Electrical on their motor control gear division, they used to run all their machines using Crabtree controls, as did Matchbox, London Rubber, Mc Vities, and many OEM's and the BBC used it like it was going out of fashion, but most of these sites are new retail parks or housing estates, sad days indeed.

[xrunner]

People around the world would once buy British products if they could because it was a given that we made the best products. That torch is now carried on only by a few elite companies like Aim TTi Ltd.

I had a Marconi 2022 RF sig gen it was a really nice piece of kit. 

[Mr. Scram]

Ah yes, the famous British car industry. Know for producing dead reliable products, especially in the electrics department.   

[bitseeker]

Attempts to reproduce the functionality of the Tektronix 130 going well. the original unit:



Reference oscillator and mixer working. This allows me to do frequency comparison of the reference oscillator and a signal generator.

Simple bit of kit really, especially now it is devoid of tubes. Left to right: colpitts oscillator ~140KHz, buffer, attenuator, mixer (diff amp). Yes I know it's on a breadboard - will deal with the problems associated with that later on

That's neat. It sure got small with those "modern" components.

[bd139]

Ah yes, the famous British car industry. Know for producing dead reliable products, especially in the electrics department.   

https://youtu.be/WO1ebXqUFDw

[beanflying]

It had to be done I guess 

Dead Bug styling under 10mm ID

https://youtu.be/7_-zo9bFoS0

[Specmaster]

I have an automated reply from RS regarding the missing meter, saying that they aim to get me an answer within 1 working day. Humph considering I sent the email yesterday at 12:28 and the reply came in this morning at 08:03 suggests that it isn't an automated reply after all? Its now 16 days since placing the order for the re-calibration 

Meanwhile on other news I think I must becoming a volt nut seeing as I have snapped up this new calibrator on the Bay which normally sells for around £250 mark and I got it for £55, bargain.

[tggzzz]

Meanwhile on other news I think I must becoming a volt nut seeing as I have snapped up this new calibrator on the Bay which normally sells for around £250 mark and I got it for £55, bargain.

+-(200ppm+2) is a start

[mnementh]

It had to be done I guess 

Dead Bug styling under 10mm ID

[VIDEO OMITTED]

Hmmm... reminds me very much of a 1KHz oscillator project I built when I was in school... I made it to go inside one of these as a signal injector for troubleshooting audio amplifiers. A nice side-effect was that it would drive a speaker to audible levels if the wires were placed across the power switch. My first version was a simple push-pull sawtooth with MPS2222s on a strip of breadboard; later I redesigned around the LM358 to be able to get sine output. That I built dead-bug and just epoxy-potted a sailmaker's needle between the IC and nose of the light. That was a lot harder to fit as I needed to make room for 2 AAs; the transistor version worked down to 1.3 volts or so off a single AA.

Hmmm.... nowadays I could do something similar with a micro and run it off a 14500 Li cell...


mnem
Damn you bean!!! 

[Specmaster]

I had a phone call this afternoon from RS reference my 3478A. Apparently they say that the meter is a very poorly one and they have tried 3 times to get it calibrated and it always reads low so that they cannot give it a serial number for the certificate

They said that it was also to old to repair  I was chatting a nice lady in the calibration dept about this so I asked her how low was it reading and that if is was a few mV away that it would acceptable as I don't need to it be absolutely 100% spot on, if its 99.6% or better thats good enough. She kept trying to get me to have a look at their range of meters and if I found a suitable one that they would calibrate it. I explained that if I was in a position to be able to afford anew meter, why would I be buying a 30 year old one?

Anyway, I have send her the photos that show what it was reading against my AD584-M voltage module and explained that if they can get it back to those reading it would good enough for my purposes so now its waiting to what happens on Monday.

[bd139]

FFS there's nothing wrong with it.  They're just shit or can't RTFM. It can't actually read low if they have done the job properly. Sounds like they haven't zeroed it or followed the shorting process properly.

I've done a temporary cal on mine and it's literally on the mark across the board down to 4 digits against my in cal U1241C. Still will drop it off at Calmet when I get 5 minutes.

I'd ask for your money back because it should have taken them way less time than it has to find that out.

[mnementh]

IME, "too old" means "We don't have service/calibration documentation on your equipment, and we don't have anybody smart enough to figure it out themselves with enough actual engineering knowledge to service analog circuitry." 

Good luck widdat.


mnem
I survived the morning working out in the Tejas suck. I need a medal or some damned thing. And a LOT of iced tea.

[bd139]

Yep. Divs.

It's not even analogue to cal it. You just:

1. turn the switch
2. stick it in the range you want to cal
3. short it.
4. press the cal button
5. apply 1/3rd scale (not even required on all ranges)
6. adjust the display to the calibration voltage if you need to.
7. press cal.
8. goto 2.

Eventually when you've done them all it'll start up with SELF TEST OK 

If it's reading low, it's basically a Y=MX+C transform where M and C are calibration variables. So someone put the wrong fucking M or C in.

When I did mine I did it with a PSU and connected the U1241 in series (current) or parallel (voltage) to it. Resistance I used some 1% resistors and frigged the display value to match the U1241's interpretation of the value. The linearity is amazingly good so was spot on when I cranked it up near FSD.

These are 100% works or doesn't work instruments.

[Cerebus]

These are 100% works or doesn't work instruments.

Not entirely. The resistance ranges can be knackered with the rest working fine. I don't know why, in principle there's nothing obviously wrong with the designs, but HP always had problems with the current sources on resistance ranges. If you've an HP34xx and everything's working perfectly except resistance then it's always the current sources. It's a stock fault for HP meters.

[mnementh]

Sounds to me like they need to hire one of you guys to run their Cal lab. 

Of course, it's always possible they... no, I'm NOT gonna say it. Not gonna jinx a friend.


mnem