Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[0culus]

Awww, plastic. That's no good. As usual, probably better to just pay up for better quality tools (panavise, etc)

[tggzzz]

Annoyingly I just shelved the purchase for a week as I just walked out to go and grab some pizzas and found out I've got a flat tyre ffs 

Stop whining. Six months ago I went out and found the coilspring had snapped. Lovely clunking noise as I drove it to the garage.

Three weeks later the other one snapped!

Anyway, off to buy a freezer, assuming there are any left in the shops.

Joy. Not what you need. I am mostly annoyed because if I order it and I’m not in which is most of this week I need to get to bloody Weybridge to pick it up.

On food, stacked still in the shops. Bercow, notorious for a bollocks to brexit sticker on his car, threw a grenade in the works today. Fingers crossed that will push it back to where I can eat my tinned food leisurely rather than out of necessity.

It has certainly crystallised the (lack of) options; that's what prompted me to rush out and buy the freezer that I had been looking at. Fortunately one of my local Currys had one in stock. Now all I've got to do is decide where to put it. I made sure it worked to -15C, so while I'd rather not put it in my unpowered asbestos sheeting "garage", I can put it underneath my kitchen.

[bd139]

It has certainly crystallised the (lack of) options; that's what prompted me to rush out and buy the freezer that I had been looking at. Fortunately one of my local Currys had one in stock. Now all I've got to do is decide where to put it. I made sure it worked to -15C, so while I'd rather not put it in my unpowered asbestos sheeting "garage", I can put it underneath my kitchen.

I had a big chest freezer in a similar garage in my old house. Got rather warm in there in the summer which caused some serious problems with it and it gave out eventually. I'd keep it indoors if you can. The only thing in my current freezer is about £50 of Greggs industrial sausage rolls which "fell off back of a lorry" My investment is mostly canned and bulk bagged stuff.

Edit: one thing I used to do a lot, but alas no longer really is make bread. Can't beat it. Plus there's something scientificy and engineeringy about it. Last attempt a couple of years back:

[tggzzz]

It has certainly crystallised the (lack of) options; that's what prompted me to rush out and buy the freezer that I had been looking at. Fortunately one of my local Currys had one in stock. Now all I've got to do is decide where to put it. I made sure it worked to -15C, so while I'd rather not put it in my unpowered asbestos sheeting "garage", I can put it underneath my kitchen.

I had a big chest freezer in a similar garage in my old house. Got rather warm in there in the summer which caused some serious problems with it and it gave out eventually. I'd keep it indoors if you can. The only thing in my current freezer is about £50 of Greggs industrial sausage rolls which "fell off back of a lorry" My investment is mostly canned and bulk bagged stuff.

... and if they didn't make a hole in the road, they will make a hole in your stomach.

Most of my investment is canned/jars/bulk dry stuff, but for reasons I'm not prepared to go into here, I also really want/need to one fresh vegetable. Even commercially frozen is a problem since the blanching destroys one of the two key chemicals. Now I believe I can get that chemical from dessicated[1] mooli, but it is all somewhat unclear!

So I'll freeze my own without blanching, and, if I get off my backside keyboard, I'll also be able to freeze veg from the garden.

[1] my daughter has a dessicator that was £12 on special offer at Amazon, and is quite fun to use. The smell of mushrooms drying is quite pleasant.

[tautech]

My old dog tucker and bait freezer gave up the ghost a week of so ago....thank heavens it was in the garage, we knew it was dead from the pong ! 
Didn't dare open it to check  and when I had a mo a couple of days later dragged it out the double garage door with a rope and tractor.
Then slid the front end loader forks under it and ever so gently closed the log tusk onto it so it wouldn't fall off and took it to a deep hole down the farm that the son had prepared with his 14t digger.
So with clothes peg fastened on my snout tipped the rotting stick into the hole and got the hell outta there leaving the lad to cover it with 2m of clay. 

What a nightmare it would be dealing with that sort of thing in town. 

[tggzzz]

Edit: one thing I used to do a lot, but alas no longer really is make bread. Can't beat it. Plus there's something scientificy and engineeringy about it.

The smell of baking bread hits the hindbrain hard - to the extent it is reckoned to be useful when selling a house

Nowadays I just use a Panasonic breadmaker. If I foolishly take it out when still warm, 200g bread instantly disappears along with lashings of melted butter.

When I get my next breadmaker, I'll fork out the extra for the little compartment used to contain goodies added at the final stage of mixing.

[bd139]

... and if they didn't make a hole in the road, they will make a hole in your stomach.

Most of my investment is canned/jars/bulk dry stuff, but for reasons I'm not prepared to go into here, I also really want/need to one fresh vegetable. Even commercially frozen is a problem since the blanching destroys one of the two key chemicals. Now I believe I can get that chemical from dessicated[1] mooli, but it is all somewhat unclear!

So I'll freeze my own without blanching, and, if I get off my backside keyboard, I'll also be able to freeze veg from the garden.

[1] my daughter has a dessicator that was £12 on special offer at Amazon, and is quite fun to use. The smell of mushrooms drying is quite pleasant.

Indeed. I can handle about one a week myself. I can't stand mooli. It smells of farts whatever I do with it!

Dessicator looks fun for sure. Interestingly, and TEA related, the cupboard where I used to keep my oscilloscopes in was used for a period to grow mushrooms in. I had great luck with a suttons mushroom kit my mother bought me one year. Must have had about £50 of mushrooms out of that! Was thoroughly tired of them when it gave up.

I use these guys for seeds - very nice stuff: http://www.realseeds.co.uk/

My old dog tucker and bait freezer gave up the ghost a week of so ago....thank heavens it was in the garage, we knew it was dead from the pong ! 
Didn't dare open it to check  and when I had a mo a couple of days later dragged it out the double garage door with a rope and tractor.
Then slid the front end loader forks under it and ever so gently closed the log tusk onto it so it wouldn't fall off and took it to a deep hole down the farm that the son had prepared with his 14t digger.
So with clothes peg fastened on my snout tipped the rotting stick into the hole and got the hell outta there leaving the lad to cover it with 2m of clay. 

What a nightmare it would be dealing with that sort of thing in town. 

Gah that happened to my uncle. He worked on oil rigs on and off so no one knew when he was at home or not. Got sent home off the rig sick one day, got home and dropped dead. No one expected him to be home and he didn't tell anyone so basically rotted there for 3 months. Neighbour alerted my father when they started smelling something unpleasant. I didn't have to sort it out but I got roped into helping clear the place. Turns out the first thing he had done was go and buy some fresh maggots and chuck them in there to kill them off for his fishing days out. But the freezer had given up about the same time he had, we assume that evening. I opened the lid on that with a stick and both myself and my sister were puking for about 10 minutes. A lot of the maggots had turned to flies and it was like a scene out of alien in that freezer. Defrosted food, maggots, all sorts. Total nightmare. I will never forget that. We hired a disposal company to come out and sort that out.  Good plan with the burying it idea 

Edit: one thing I used to do a lot, but alas no longer really is make bread. Can't beat it. Plus there's something scientificy and engineeringy about it.

The smell of baking bread hits the hindbrain hard - to the extent it is reckoned to be useful when selling a house

Nowadays I just use a Panasonic breadmaker. If I foolishly take it out when still warm, 200g bread instantly disappears along with lashings of melted butter.

When I get my next breadmaker, I'll fork out the extra for the little compartment used to contain goodies added at the final stage of mixing.

Does it leave a buggery hole in the side of the loaf? The last bread maker I did which annoyed me. End up using a kenwood chef with dough hook (ebay £20!) which ironically for this thread blew a RIFA and scared the original owner away from using it. That and leaving it next to the dryer to rise with a wet tea towel over it.

[nfmax]

Edit: one thing I used to do a lot, but alas no longer really is make bread. Can't beat it. Plus there's something scientificy and engineeringy about it. Last attempt a couple of years back:

There is: and the cooking equivalent of AoE is McGee - https://www.amazon.co.uk/McGee-Food-Cooking-Encyclopedia-Kitchen/dp/0340831499/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1552940102&sr=8-1&keywords=mcgee+on+food+and+cooking

[Mr. Scram]

My old dog tucker and bait freezer gave up the ghost a week of so ago....thank heavens it was in the garage, we knew it was dead from the pong ! 
Didn't dare open it to check  and when I had a mo a couple of days later dragged it out the double garage door with a rope and tractor.
Then slid the front end loader forks under it and ever so gently closed the log tusk onto it so it wouldn't fall off and took it to a deep hole down the farm that the son had prepared with his 14t digger.
So with clothes peg fastened on my snout tipped the rotting stick into the hole and got the hell outta there leaving the lad to cover it with 2m of clay. 

What a nightmare it would be dealing with that sort of thing in town. 

That ought to make for an interesting archaeological dig in a thousand years or so.

[bd139]

There is: and the cooking equivalent of AoE is McGee - https://www.amazon.co.uk/McGee-Food-Cooking-Encyclopedia-Kitchen/dp/0340831499/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1552940102&sr=8-1&keywords=mcgee+on+food+and+cooking

Thanks for the link - appreciated. I will look into that.

[Mr. Scram]

I keep being amazed at the turds people dare to call good to excellent. Even the pictures are too grimy to hold. 

[worsthorse]

So I stepped away for what seemed just a moment and there are three pages of posts to catch up with.    

Which I will do. In the meantime, I find myself wishing that I had a decent RF power meter for a non-TEA project - yes there are such things - building some mixer circuits for learning/comparison purposes. Knowing that I will open a giant can of worms, but here goes:

What would you all recommend for measuring RF power on the less than 1W scale? and for grins, how about less than 5W?

Of course, I want it cheap, will fix it if it doesn't work quite right, and I am willing to scour ebay and CL until I find it...

[bd139]

So I stepped away for what seemed just a moment and there are three pages of posts to catch up with.    

Which I will do. In the meantime, I find myself wishing that I had a decent RF power meter for a non-TEA project - yes there are such things - building some mixer circuits for learning/comparison purposes. Knowing that I will open a giant can of worms, but here goes:

What would you all recommend for measuring RF power on the less than 1W scale? and for grins, how about less than 5W?

Of course, I want it cheap, will fix it if it doesn't work quite right, and I am willing to scour ebay and CL until I find it...

https://www.qsl.net/sz1a/download/build%20an%20rf%20power%20meter.pdf

Edit: buy a spectrum analyser.

Failing that, make one. AD8307 from aliexpress (10 for $5 last time I got some), some gubbins and you're done. That's good up to 10dBm. You can get 10dB power attenuators from aliexpress for not much - stuff them on the front of it. Or build a tap attenuator.

Linear over ~80dB of dynamic range. Easy to build a cal curve for with a signal generator.

Here's the first one I made:



Here's the second one I made:



There's a third one with mounting holes that I didn't fuck the SMA pads up on as well but I don't have a picture of that one handy (it takes me three spins to get anything right)

Edit: I added a small low pass pi filter and a buffer amplifer on the second one. As it has log output, you can sweep filters and stuff with a log output signal generator (DG1022Z here) as well to get wonderful things like this bode plot of filter response:

[Cubdriver]

Drat, just been outbid again on a lovely TTi power supply by just £2, sold as possible not working but it still went for £76.50 

Out of curiosity, I noticed that the winner was shown as p***t (2248) so I clicked on the winners tab and it came up as S***G (2248) so  is going on here, my ebay is shown correctly so I clicked on the other bidders and their info was also changed, am I missing something or what, I cant say as I've ever really noticed that before 

Spec, the thing to keep in mind (as frustrating as it feels to lose by what seems only a small amount) is that if there's only one other who's bid higher than you, you'll never lose by more than whatever the current bid increment is - the ending price doesn't tell you what their max bid actually is, only that it's at least the minimum bidding increment higher than yours.  That person may have REALLY wanted that supply and actually bid £120 - there's no way to know, as the proxy system will simply set their bid to yours + increment until you get above their max.

As for the randomization, I never noticed it redid it every time you clicked, but apparently based on what you and others are saying, it does.  And of course it shows YOURS correctly - there's no reason to randomize that - you're you!  Try looking without signing in, and I bet yours is gibberish, too.

-Pat

[tggzzz]

I keep being amazed at the turds people dare to call good to excellent. Even the pictures are too grimy to hold. 

What are you talking about? Top tip: there's a "quote" button.

[Mr. Scram]

What are you talking about? Top tip: there's a "quote" button.

I'm talking about some of the pictures I've been presented with by candidate sellers. They claim a good or excellent condition, but send you pictures with devices that looks like they're recovered from a bomb crater or sewer.

[worsthorse]

So I stepped away for what seemed just a moment and there are three pages of posts to catch up with.    

Which I will do. In the meantime, I find myself wishing that I had a decent RF power meter for a non-TEA project - yes there are such things - building some mixer circuits for learning/comparison purposes. Knowing that I will open a giant can of worms, but here goes:

What would you all recommend for measuring RF power on the less than 1W scale? and for grins, how about less than 5W?

Of course, I want it cheap, will fix it if it doesn't work quite right, and I am willing to scour ebay and CL until I find it...

https://www.qsl.net/sz1a/download/build%20an%20rf%20power%20meter.pdf

Edit: buy a spectrum analyser.

Failing that, make one. AD8307 from aliexpress (10 for $5 last time I got some), some gubbins and you're done. That's good up to 10dBm. You can get 10dB power attenuators from aliexpress for not much - stuff them on the front of it. Or build a tap attenuator.

Linear over ~80dB of dynamic range. Easy to build a cal curve for with a signal generator.

Here's the first one I made:



Here's the second one I made:



There's a third one with mounting holes that I didn't fuck the SMA pads up on as well but I don't have a picture of that one handy (it takes me three spins to get anything right)

Edit: I added a small low pass pi filter and a buffer amplifer on the second one. As it has log output, you can sweep filters and stuff with a log output signal generator (DG1022Z here) as well to get wonderful things like this bode plot of filter response:

I should have also said, and I don't want to make one or use my spectrum analyzer... You are right, I should just build one. The article you included is the one I considered.   two questions for you... the AD8307s you bought turned out okay? that's quite a discount from the digikey price.    and did you build the 40dB tap described in the article? 

edit: I could probably fit the whole circuit into one of the tektronix "accessory" boxes I just picked up. and, version three looks pretty good!

[Specmaster]

Certainly worth every penny as a diag aid but NOT rigid enough for proto work, especially if you need to cut/drill/route wires.
As bd says, the whole thing just turns too easily in the pivots, and being made of plastic, you can only tighten things up so much.  Another case of "The right tool for the job".

mnem
*back out into garage-hell*
[/quote]
Made of plastic?? not the one I have I can assure you it's made out of steel and solid enough, but as the board is only held in 2 locations, it can pivot easy enough.

[Specmaster]

It has certainly crystallised the (lack of) options; that's what prompted me to rush out and buy the freezer that I had been looking at. Fortunately one of my local Currys had one in stock. Now all I've got to do is decide where to put it. I made sure it worked to -15C, so while I'd rather not put it in my unpowered asbestos sheeting "garage", I can put it underneath my kitchen.

I had a big chest freezer in a similar garage in my old house. Got rather warm in there in the summer which caused some serious problems with it and it gave out eventually. I'd keep it indoors if you can. The only thing in my current freezer is about £50 of Greggs industrial sausage rolls which "fell off back of a lorry" My investment is mostly canned and bulk bagged stuff.

Edit: one thing I used to do a lot, but alas no longer really is make bread. Can't beat it. Plus there's something scientificy and engineeringy about it. Last attempt a couple of years back:

I still have 2 bread making machines, must try and stock up on ingredients to bake our own bread in case of problems looming large if we crash out 

[bd139]

I should have also said, and I don't want to make one or use my spectrum analyzer... You are right, I should just build one. The article you included is the one I considered.   two questions for you... the AD8307s you bought turned out okay? that's quite a discount from the digikey price.    and did you build the 40dB tap described in the article? 

edit: I could probably fit the whole circuit into one of the tektronix "accessory" boxes I just picked up. and, version three looks pretty good!

Buying one where someone hasnt blown up the power sensor for a reasonable price is nigh on impossible so building one worked out cheaper and easier in the end. The AD8307s I got were perfectly fine. Worked as per the spec sheet. They're usually around $10 each so 10 for $5 was worth a punt and it played out nicely.

I didn't build the 40dB tap as per the article. I built a 20dB attenuator in another pomona box and used a couple of 10dB attenuators from aliexpress (150W flange attenuators - working pulls) for the next stage.

Most of the time I use a "piece of shit meter" for higher powers which is some 3W metal oxide resistors and diode and a resistor in a box connected to an old 100uA panel meter. Only good to about 30MHz that though.

[0culus]

Well, it had to happen eventually. The 8664A sig gen I bought arrived with severe damage. The unit had to have been dropped from some height, because the right rack handle is destroyed and the RF output is bent severely.

[Specmaster]

Drat, just been outbid again on a lovely TTi power supply by just £2, sold as possible not working but it still went for £76.50 

Out of curiosity, I noticed that the winner was shown as p***t (2248) so I clicked on the winners tab and it came up as S***G (2248) so  is going on here, my ebay is shown correctly so I clicked on the other bidders and their info was also changed, am I missing something or what, I cant say as I've ever really noticed that before 

Spec, the thing to keep in mind (as frustrating as it feels to lose by what seems only a small amount) is that if there's only one other who's bid higher than you, you'll never lose by more than whatever the current bid increment is - the ending price doesn't tell you what their max bid actually is, only that it's at least the minimum bidding increment higher than yours.  That person may have REALLY wanted that supply and actually bid £120 - there's no way to know, as the proxy system will simply set their bid to yours + increment until you get above their max.

As for the randomization, I never noticed it redid it every time you clicked, but apparently based on what you and others are saying, it does.  And of course it shows YOURS correctly - there's no reason to randomize that - you're you!  Try looking without signing in, and I bet yours is gibberish, too.

-Pat

Yep, you're correct sir, I have no idea just how far the winner was prepared to go, I hope that it turns out to a nasty turd now for him ... not really, but I'm beginning to wish I'd set my max bid higher though. That said I can console myself with the thought that it was really a luxury for me as I don't use the 2 power supplies I have got that much anyway and if I need to go to 60, wire them in series and I'm there.

[Specmaster]

Yeah. I put a not so large board in one and it popped out of the clips on the side. Also the boards tend to slide out when you're turning them.

Annoyingly I just shelved the purchase for a week as I just walked out to go and grab some pizzas and found out I've got a flat tyre ffs 

I know how you feel, my nearside front keep going down every 2 to 3 weeks, new tyre 8,000 miles ago, no sign of damage to the tyre so I'm hoping that I haven't got a cracked alloy from the steaming great potholes round here, if so than thats going to cost heaps of bleeding money as they are special ones only available on my particular model ffs. 

[GreyWoolfe]

Random question ... anyone got any experience with Panavise?

I have just cleaned up my CC from amateur radio crap sales and have itchy spendy fingers and it's likely to fix a number of problems I've got with the number of hands I have when working on SMD boards and deadbug stuff. But there are two options ...

... standard good for everything...



... and board holder...



Any thoughts welcome

Edit: or option 3 - this will make my life harder

I own both plus a 3rd with a vise head.  You would do well with either or both.  You should probably get both plus a vise.  Nothing exceeds like excess. 

[Johnny10]

Bread!  I Love making bread.