Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[med6753]

Funny, that "Go Away" comment reminds me that my Mother had this for our "Welcome Mat" at the front door. 

[mansaxel]

Reminds me of Y2K. I was a manager of an equipment maintenance area responsible for device placement equipment. Full of PC/AT's with DOS, OS/2, and Win3.1. Months and months of prep work and we were all on site that night waiting for the world to collapse.

Not even a fucking whimper. 

We did the same. It turned out the same. Best paid weekend ever.

The problem for sysadmins (and sound engineers, it is similar!) is that when you do your job, nothing untoward happens. No-one notices. And when the entire world is torn between champagne and doom expectations, and the sysadmins have done their homework, the doom fails to apply, people don't realise that they ought to ask for  more champagne but instead start questioning the lack of doom.

 

[med6753]

Reminds me of Y2K. I was a manager of an equipment maintenance area responsible for device placement equipment. Full of PC/AT's with DOS, OS/2, and Win3.1. Months and months of prep work and we were all on site that night waiting for the world to collapse.

Not even a fucking whimper. 

We did the same. It turned out the same. Best paid weekend ever.

The problem for sysadmins (and sound engineers, it is similar!) is that when you do your job, nothing untoward happens. No-one notices. And when the entire world is torn between champagne and doom expectations, and the sysadmins have done their homework, the doom fails to apply, people don't realise that they ought to ask for  more champagne but instead start questioning the lack of doom.

 

My troops collected OT. I was salaried. Got nothing except to spend my New Year's Eve in a conference room watching TV as Y2K spread across the globe and the news media falling over themselves trying to find something that crashed. 

[bd139]

This one always comes to mind:

https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

[Specmaster]

Ugh woke up to DST change and about 50 emails where shit has fallen over. Fun fun fun. Going back to bed 

More seriously, considering a 56400a for the HP collection. I have full schematics for one of them. Memory depth is awful and it’s only good for repetitive signals but it is currently cheap and they’re fun to use.

Our DST ends next Sunday, November 3rd.

And yes, for some reason there's always some systems/programs that can't handle the time change and crash. We had our main log system that always did that and no one ever fixed it. 

Indeed. My favourite one was the hour long appointment system I saw. It was a slot booking system which obviously did hour long appointments. So it stored the start time in UTC. Fair enough. But then they had a requirement to have 30 minute and 2 hour appointments so they hired the lowest bidder to modify it. Alas along came DST and 99% of the appointments were still 1h long. But the idiots stored the end time as a local time so it collapsed everything to 0h long and caused chaos and about £500k or loss  I only charged then 2% of that to fix it 

Nice one that 

[Specmaster]

Reminds me of Y2K. I was a manager of an equipment maintenance area responsible for device placement equipment. Full of PC/AT's with DOS, OS/2, and Win3.1. Months and months of prep work and we were all on site that night waiting for the world to collapse.

Not even a fucking whimper. 

Apparently, depending what the system was and how bad the programming was, it did have massive potentail but there seems that there was amassive amount of work undertaken to check and correct a lot of the problems as this link explains. It is discussion centred around the UK Brexit shit but they were exploring if the Y2K thing was also what a lot of leavers over here have accused the experts of when they say that Brexit is going to be a terrible thing for the UK.

[mnementh]

Welp... The lady at the border crossing looked at us and the kids exactly twice, then waved us through. We're on the QEX about 45 minutes from Toronto.

Kosmic, think you should lock up the women & hide the fried chicken, eh...? Hoser-Dwagon is officially in da Great White North!!!

I just hope everything goes as smoothly with the rental property...

Pancakes and Maple syrup for your first breakfast in the GWN  memn ?

As delightful as that sounds, too late. Coffee & "Everything" bagel with too much cream cheese FTW...

It's orificial... we have a new address! Keys, parking spot, everything just like real people. 

And of course, over that very first coffee & bagel, already my first international shipping headache... Found a killer deal on a Lenovo Flex 3-1580 Core i7-6500U for $175; had to ship it to my dad in NY cuz seller specifically excludes Canada destinations. 

mnem
I have too much blood in my caffeine circulatory system right now...

[Brumby]

There goes the neighbourhood.   

[med6753]

There goes the neighbourhood.   

LMAO 

[mnementh]

LMAO Indeed! 




In Other News, Eh!

Well, that sucked out loud. (Nuked leftover) coffee & a bagel was just what I needed to jump-start my heart. Went to brew fresh for me & the wife; discovered that the coffee pot the owners left behind was in fact... a kettle. 

Tim Horton's to the rescue!!! 

mnem

[med6753]

More calibrations today. Fluke 8600A. This one did not go well and in fact stopped the process. It's out of spec.

When I first got this 8600A it had severe drift issues. In the process of attempting to repair I replaced the PSU caps, some tants and poly caps on the main board, the 1MHz oscillator crystal, plus a few other parts. I thought the problem was the zener reference itself but it has tested rock stable. I finally tracked the drift down to contact resistance on some of the range reed relays. So I replaced all of them. That finally fixed the drifting issues. I thought all the issues were fixed but apparently not.

I can calibrate the 190mV, 1.9V, 19V, and 190V and they are repeatable and right on. But if I check other DC voltages with the AD584-M the 2.5V, 5.0V, and 7.5V are OK but applying 9.99691V I get this:

10.001V. Way out. Should be max 9.9970V.


So I stopped the cal for now and this guy is in the repair cue. But I think it's going to be a tough issue to track down may not be worth the effort.   

Jeez you're a hard person to please aint ya? I would consider that being just 4mv after the many years of service, a win personally, come on now are you really going to noticing the differance in practise? 

Don't confuse Specification, Accuracy and Calibration 

If you look at the actual spec on the 20V range for the 8600A for example it is 0.02% + 0.005% of range. So an in spec reading of a 10V source would be 2mV reading + 1mV range. So it is well within Specification and at 10V (assuming an accurate source) it is accurate. The process to attempt to make it nearer is the Calibration bit.

Let me get you a bigger shovel and take away the ladder from your deepening hole 

_{you need a 6 1/2 digit meter, you need a 6 1/2 digit meter, you need a 6 1/2 digit meter, you need a 6 1/2 digit meter, you need a 6 1/2 digit meter}

Not in spec unless I'm doing something wrong.  9.99691V plus 0.003V equals 9.99991V. The 8600A is reading 10.001V. Yea, it's close but no cigar.

And I don't need 6.5 digits 

Been mulling this over and here's what I'm going to do. I've been using the Fluke 8050A to set up and monitor the 190mV, 1.9V, and 19V references. Rather than the 8050A I'll use the Siglent SDM 3055. That way I'll get better resolution and better accuracy. I'll run through the 8600A cal again. If the result is that reading is 10.000V or less I'll quit my bellyaching and be happy. If it's still above 10.000V the sucker is broke...no 2 two ways about it.

Just powered both of them up and going to let them sit and stabilize for at least 12 hours.

OK, here goes. Both the Siglent and Fluke been powered up for 12+ hours. I set the 190mV, 1.9V, and 19V references with the Siglent. Carefully followed the Fluke calibration procedure to the letter as per the manual. The result? SUCCESS! 

The Fluke now reads 9.999V against the AD584-M reference of 9.99691V. I'm happy with that. Done deal. This 8600A is out of the dog house. 

[med6753]

Well, that sucked out loud. (Nuked leftover) coffee & a bagel was just what I needed to jump-start my heart. Went to brew fresh for me & the wife; discovered that the coffee pot the owners left behind was in fact... a kettle. 

Tim Horton's to the rescue!!! 

mnem

Tim Horton's 

[Specmaster]

@med, great thats good news, I just couldn't that it was out of cal, Flukes are normally bob on. But, now lets be realistic shall we, do you normally switch your gear and leave for 12 hours before using it? I expect the answer is no, you switch it on when need to use it, use and when you're done, switch it off again, so if thats the case aren't you going to back to the real likelhood of it reading 10.001V again when your connect your AD584-M?? If so you have just wasted 12 hours of power to lose just 2mV in which case its back to my original position of it being good enough 

[Specmaster]

@mnem, Glad to hear that you're now at your new home after all this time, now begins the mamonth task of fitting the furniture in and getting your gear unpacked and setting the bench up again but at the least the air temperature is a lot lower so you'll be able keep going for longer now that the big suck has gone. Well done my friend with the kettle, thats a mistake you wont make again in a hurry   

[med6753]

@med, great thats good news, I just couldn't that it was out of cal, Flukes are normally bob on. But, now lets be realistic shall we, do you normally switch your gear and leave for 12 hours before using it? I expect the answer is no, you switch it on when need to use it, use and when you're done, switch it off again, so if thats the case aren't you going to back to the real likelhood of it reading 10.001V again when your connect your AD584-M?? If so you have just wasted 12 hours of power to lose just 2mV in which case its back to my original position of it being good enough 

Normally if I'm working on something I try to anticipate what equipment I need and get it powered up for at least a half hour to one hour before using it.

So let's do this little experiment. Tomorrow morning I'll power up the 8600A and within a half hour I'll connect it to the AD584-M and post the results. I promise I won't cheat. 

[Martin.M]

what is the different between 8600A and 8600AU?

[med6753]

I don't know but I did a quick Google search and most of what comes up related to "8600AU" is in German. So perhaps unique to Germany? 

[Specmaster]

Could be, Martin posted a photo of this on the forum here last year https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/show-your-multimeter! message #850

[Cubdriver]

what is the different between 8600A and 8600AU?

(Attachment Link)

The displays in the 'AU' version are mounted upside-down so they'll be easier for the Aussies to read?   

-Pat

[mansaxel]

Hamfest yesterday. Got a roll of new coax, Messi & Paoloni Ultraflex 10,3mm. (Like LMR400 or RG213, dimension-wise) and found some nice NOS binding posts. Also, some enterprising person has gotten a plastics manufacturing company in southern Sweden to do UNEF 5/8"-24TPI plugs, that fit on N connectors and, if you are so unlucky, shielded banana plugs. Fitted to my field-day cables with captive cords so as to not be lost in grass.

Binding posts have already been put to use, building my own resistance standard. The zinc box is the one. The other, plastic one, is a 2x1KΩ voltage divider with chinesium posts that is required for checking the 428B.  I'm still waiting for the actual resistor (Vishay 0,005% 1KΩ)  for the "fine box", so just threw a 100Ω 1% (but it is more like 0,2% according to most of my meters) in it to check the setup.

[factory]

I've been working on the first of the four Tek scopes I recently acquired, most of the parts have now arrived from RS & Farnell, so I started on the 2465 PSU with the blown RIFA's. 


Probably beginners luck, the fan came off without breaking the collet. 


The only capacitors that had oozed electrolyte were the largest ones, luckily with no damage to the traces.


I'm not changing any of the big axial Sprague capacitors unless they test bad.


As expected these two capacitors are still good and will go in my spares stock for repairing other TE, replacements were ordered as paper RIFA's can be found in place of these.


David

[worsthorse]

Set aside the 8840A until the option 09 board arrives (Monday or Tuesday?).  Spent my breakfast pondering time trying to convince myself that I should have one of my 5.5 digit meters "paid for" calibrated so I can use it as a reference for the other meters that I need to do (there are two Fluke 8840As, two HP 3478As, and a Keithley 199 and another four handheld DMMs of various stripes).   

But I am not there yet, so I spent the morning playing around with the small pile of voltage and resistance references I have bought or built and wandering into ebay to see how much a "real" voltage calibrator would cost. 

Doesn't seem like a purchase I am likely to make any time soon.

Finally decided to do something fruitful, so I repaired the type 106 that I tried to blow up last week. Spent a pleasant afternoon running it through the performance check and it works again.  Going to recalibrate it this evening.  When this one is finished, I will have worked through the entire pile of Tektronix big box signal generators. 

[Kosmic]

Welp... The lady at the border crossing looked at us and the kids exactly twice, then waved us through. We're on the QEX about 45 minutes from Toronto.

Kosmic, think you should lock up the women & hide the fried chicken, eh...? Hoser-Dwagon is officially in da Great White North!!!

I just hope everything goes as smoothly with the rental property...

Ho sh*&t, you crossed the border already!

Welcome to Canada, I hope you're going to like it!

[Kosmic]

Funny, that "Go Away" comment reminds me that my Mother had this for our "Welcome Mat" at the front door. 

I need one of those!

[Kosmic]

Welp... The lady at the border crossing looked at us and the kids exactly twice, then waved us through. We're on the QEX about 45 minutes from Toronto.

Kosmic, think you should lock up the women & hide the fried chicken, eh...? Hoser-Dwagon is officially in da Great White North!!!

I just hope everything goes as smoothly with the rental property...

Pancakes and Maple syrup for your first breakfast in the GWN  memn ?

As delightful as that sounds, too late. Coffee & "Everything" bagel with too much cream cheese FTW...

It's orificial... we have a new address! Keys, parking spot, everything just like real people. 

And of course, over that very first coffee & bagel, already my first international shipping headache... Found a killer deal on a Lenovo Flex 3-1580 Core i7-6500U for $175; had to ship it to my dad in NY cuz seller specifically excludes Canada destinations. 

mnem
I have too much blood in my caffeine circulatory system right now...

If you are not too far from the border you can use Kinek. You get a US address but you need to collect your packages yourself.