Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Ero-Shan]

Thanks for the offer, it's not necessary since I rarely use that scope. Otherwise, a teardown would be interesting anyway. I guess there's some kind of micro involved, since I don't know of a way to connect a battery backed SRAM through a SUB-D 9 connector without one. Or maybe some shift registers? This SUB-D 9 isn't a RS232 at all AFAIR.

Possibly an I2C battery backed up RAM? PCF8570/8571? Or RTC PCF8583?

Rainer

I was curious myself and pulled the settings-saving-plug of my PM3065:
(Attachment Link)

Bingo! It is indeed PCF8570-based. I reverse-engineered it, so here's the schematic. Use at your own risk.   
(Attachment Link)

Thanks for the schematics in URI-Cad. Wonder if my ECAD software can read it?

While I don't expect to use it, I keep it, of course. You never know.

And I couldn't resist opening the PM3050. Wanted to look at the RIFA,. Ashamed to say that I couldn't even get the supply PCB out of the case.  Put the cover back on and the scope in the attic to join the others ...

[bd139]

Had confirmation, all orders from Bitbox and RS are now dispatched. Just realised that tomorrow is Good Friday so no post tomorrow, hopefully it will all be here Saturday then 

RS will turn up Tuesday. Bitsbox Wednesday I reckon. It's a shit show at the moment. Plus we're getting postal workers walking out now.

[Cerebus]

@bd139, How are feeling now? better I hope? I'm awaiting the arrival of a heating engineer to service my boiler as it is overdue and keeps going to limp mode 

This happens to many men of your age, don't feel bad about it. 

[Ero-Shan]

I finally found my blunder! GPSDO works again for more than a few minutes.

Yes the CPU is bored like hell.

Still up after more than 4 hours:



Me happy.

[Neomys Sapiens]

@bd139, How are feeling now? better I hope? I'm awaiting the arrival of a heating engineer to service my boiler as it is overdue and keeps going to limp mode 

Central Services responding?

[Specmaster]

Had confirmation, all orders from Bitbox and RS are now dispatched. Just realised that tomorrow is Good Friday so no post tomorrow, hopefully it will all be here Saturday then 

RS will turn up Tuesday. Bitsbox Wednesday I reckon. It's a shit show at the moment. Plus we're getting postal workers walking out now.

I think you're right, so I'll have to reassemble the meter for now, can't have it sprawled across the bench all weekend 

[bd139]

At least you've got something to play with. Everything I've got is working and done and nothing new is appearing

Going to build that Elecraft K160RX kit this weekend and attempt to cook a mini fry up on the new trangia in the garden and that's it 

I figure the hamfests are going to be good when it picks up again. Primed ready now. Decided I need to bounce enough stuff for a new power supply and a bike.

[Cerebus]

@bd139, How are feeling now? better I hope? I'm awaiting the arrival of a heating engineer to service my boiler as it is overdue and keeps going to limp mode 

Central Services responding?

Since De Niro went all hipster and got that car ad you just can't get him to come out for a plumbing job anymore.

[mnementh]

Having not heard any news after submitting a couple of reports about errors saving changes to the TEA thread's OP, I did some debugging on my own and discovered that the post reaches its size limit in 51 more characters.

TEA is growing too much in many ways.    Do you suppose there's a post count limit for a thread? Will it wrap around? TEA2K20

Time to start spilling over and expanding post #2?  (Use some of those 51 remaining characters to say "continued below in post 2".)  If only you'd have anticipated how this thread would take on a life of its own, and put in three or four placeholder posts at the start...  Ahh, hindsight.  Always soooooo clear! 

-Pat

Whenever I remember to do that, I ALWAYS wind up with a "placemarker" post looking like a numbnuts for all eternity. And when I go back 6 months later to delete said numbnuts placemarker post, I ALWAYS wibble about it and wind up putting it off for  another 6 months.
There's your "uncertainty factor" in action... 

Can't imagine why I have been called a Pimp and Enabler  Those voltage checks were uncalibrated or tweaked from when it arrived from the USA but it did come from a good home.

I think most of us in this thread (at least the regulars) should be sporting brightly colored velvet Zoot suits and feathered pimp hats, wearing big HP, Fluke or Tektronix emblems on chains around our necks and using giant test probe walking sticks.  That's likely how any noobs that enter here imagine us as we push test gear on them.  "Come on, take a hit of e-bay - you'll love it.  No, no, it's perfectly safe!  I've been doing it for years now!  What are you afraid of?" subtly turns on dynamic signal analyzer in hopes that the loud fan masks creaking noises of floor joists

-Pat

I have no idea what you're on about... none whatsoever. 

@edavid could not get the ECP port to work with Virtualbox
@Neomys Sapiens well, I was annoyed. However Husband wants to have access to the bench to start cleaning his tools of trade (in Glock we trust)   @bd139 I can see your point. Without external power supply the parallel port driven gizmos are flakey at best, unusable at worst   @Kosmic good point. Will get a USB driven kit, I just hate to throw stuff away that may be remotely useful. Good thing about this is that I learned a bit about those virtualizers yesterday.

That's how I still have a 1.44 floppy drive in the bottom-bottom of my "old PC crap" bin. And 6 LED/switch/audio headers from various PC case front panels. And my original CDROM/Manual of win98. Oh, and the full 6-disk set of Winblows 3.1.

mnem
I also suspect that same overwhelming inertia is why my wife keeps me around...

[med6753]

Touching up the alignment on a Heath GR-88 VHF Receiver. This is an instance where a DMM is useless and a VTVM shines. The VTVM is set lowest range ACV and connected to the speaker and you tweak the IF cans for loudest hiss. Essentially a UV meter. I have found that even the bargraph displays on DMM's are too wonky to accurately perform this function. With the VTVM it's super easy.





This is a hot little receiver but too bad it doesn't cover 2M. Only 152 to 174MHz.


 

[bd139]

I actually do that with a DMM and an RF probe usually 

Nice little receiver that actually 

[med6753]

Way back before I had a scanner this little guy was pressed into service. But could only listen to one channel at a time. 

Edit, now it's tuned to National Weather Service at 162.475MHz.

[Neomys Sapiens]

I think most of us in this thread (at least the regulars) should be sporting brightly colored velvet Zoot suits and feathered pimp hats, wearing big HP, Fluke or Tektronix emblems on chains around our necks and using giant test probe walking sticks.  That's likely how any noobs that enter here imagine us as we push test gear on them.  "Come on, take a hit of e-bay - you'll love it.  No, no, it's perfectly safe!  I've been doing it for years now!  What are you afraid of?" subtly turns on dynamic signal analyzer in hopes that the loud fan masks creaking noises of floor joists

-Pat

Edit: better Logo image

I'm a bit upset about that company actually. When I had to send in my VNA recently, they promised a reduced rate for easy repairs. Now what could have been easier than pulling the PSU out of a instrument not responding to the on/off switch? They fleeced us 7500€ for that. Bavarian bandits, they are.

[mnementh]

Absolutely fine now and completely back to normal .

First symptoms on 18th March so 4 weeks it took for normality to completely resume    That's a shitter with the boiler. At least it didn't crap itself in the middle of winter!    Edit: looking back it was 15th of march so that's 3 weeks 4 days and I couldn't add when I worked out 4 weeks above 

Honeywell wireless turd. Absolutely nothing but trouble. But as the gas guy said "they're all shit. this one is just marginally less shit than the other ones"

https://www.amazon.com/White-Rodgers-Emerson-1F56N-444-Mechanical-Thermostat/dp/B006FNREO6

WARNING: This device has no brain. Use your own.

mnem

[mnementh]

I actually do that with a DMM and an RF probe usually     Nice little receiver that actually     

Yeah, I think med's a little spoiled by the BW on his VTVM; he doesn't care that "there's an app for that".

mnem

[bd139]

Way back before I had a scanner this little guy was pressed into service. But could only listen to one channel at a time. 

Edit, now it's tuned to National Weather Service at 162.475MHz.

There's something more magical about having to scan it yourself though. My old FT818 supported neatly channelised VHF stuff but it was devoid of any soul at all tuning across any band. The K2 is marginally better as it has an extremely analogue feeling stepless encoder.

See now I've seen the guts of that I want some heathkit goodies again . Got an excess of cash at the moment thanks to the non existent hamfest season so I'm going to lurk and see what I can pick up. Something dangerous and hopeless with tubes may appear 

[med6753]

Way back before I had a scanner this little guy was pressed into service. But could only listen to one channel at a time. 

Edit, now it's tuned to National Weather Service at 162.475MHz.

There's something more magical about having to scan it yourself though. My old FT818 supported neatly channelised VHF stuff but it was devoid of any soul at all tuning across any band. The K2 is marginally better as it has an extremely analogue feeling stepless encoder.

See now I've seen the guts of that I want some heathkit goodies again . Got an excess of cash at the moment thanks to the non existent hamfest season so I'm going to lurk and see what I can pick up. Something dangerous and hopeless with tubes may appear 

You want me to tear down and post a few other Heathkits so you can drool some more? More than happy to oblige.    

[AVGresponding]

What the hell, I'll post the pictures anyway.

2013 Honda CR-V. 42K miles (68Km)



2004 Honda Civic. 191K miles (306Km). Not bad for a 16 year old car. Cleaner than some people's houses. 

1990s Japanese car engines are probably the most overbuilt in history. By the early 2000s some had started to add "value engineering" but Honda were probably the slowest to follow this practice, perhaps also with Fuji Heavy Industries vehicle brand, Subaru.
(Overbuilt as opposed to understressed; the first is down to deliberately and precisely measured large engineering safety margins, the second is down to lack of ability to make precise margins and/or consistent materials.)

Bingo! It is indeed PCF8570-based. I reverse-engineered it, so here's the schematic. Use at your own risk.   

 

Your "6" is suspiciously looking like a "8" 

And his battery symbol is suspiciously backwards, is he trying to get us all to kill our PM30XX's with lithium coin cells?
 

[Saskia]

now that you mentioned it ..
found another rocket building kit in the basement ...
some motor mounts
a damaged yagi antenna, a handheld receiver and some beacons

*hmmmm*

in unrelated news I just had my annual discussion on objectives and stuff with my boss.
Decided, that my development plan should contain blurps regarding deep learning and fpga skill advancement.

And got a 2% raise.

[Cubdriver]

I think most of us in this thread (at least the regulars) should be sporting brightly colored velvet Zoot suits and feathered pimp hats, wearing big HP, Fluke or Tektronix emblems on chains around our necks and using giant test probe walking sticks.  That's likely how any noobs that enter here imagine us as we push test gear on them.  "Come on, take a hit of e-bay - you'll love it.  No, no, it's perfectly safe!  I've been doing it for years now!  What are you afraid of?" subtly turns on dynamic signal analyzer in hopes that the loud fan masks creaking noises of floor joists

-Pat

Edit: better Logo image

Yeah, that diamond-shaped part of the R&S logo would make an excellent TEA-Pimp neck charm!  (I never think of R&S as they're kind of rare (in my experience at least) on this side of the pond.)

-Pat

[bd139]

Way back before I had a scanner this little guy was pressed into service. But could only listen to one channel at a time. 

Edit, now it's tuned to National Weather Service at 162.475MHz.

There's something more magical about having to scan it yourself though. My old FT818 supported neatly channelised VHF stuff but it was devoid of any soul at all tuning across any band. The K2 is marginally better as it has an extremely analogue feeling stepless encoder.

See now I've seen the guts of that I want some heathkit goodies again . Got an excess of cash at the moment thanks to the non existent hamfest season so I'm going to lurk and see what I can pick up. Something dangerous and hopeless with tubes may appear 

You want me to tear down and post a few other Heathkits so you can drool some more? More than happy to oblige.    

Do it. I'm sure you won't get any complaints here

[Saskia]

Yeah, that diamond-shaped part of the R&S logo would make an excellent TEA-Pimp neck charm!  (I never think of R&S as they're kind of rare (in my experience at least) on this side of the pond.)

-Pat

Reminds me of that incident where a guy located in Atlanta wanted to trade me a GE J79 for some R+S radio gear.
I should have taken him up on that offer, but it would most likely have meant to deal with ITAR.

[med6753]

Way back before I had a scanner this little guy was pressed into service. But could only listen to one channel at a time. 

Edit, now it's tuned to National Weather Service at 162.475MHz.

There's something more magical about having to scan it yourself though. My old FT818 supported neatly channelised VHF stuff but it was devoid of any soul at all tuning across any band. The K2 is marginally better as it has an extremely analogue feeling stepless encoder.

See now I've seen the guts of that I want some heathkit goodies again . Got an excess of cash at the moment thanks to the non existent hamfest season so I'm going to lurk and see what I can pick up. Something dangerous and hopeless with tubes may appear 

You want me to tear down and post a few other Heathkits so you can drool some more? More than happy to oblige.    

Do it. I'm sure you won't get any complaints here

OK, here you go. Heathkit SW-7800 SWL Receiver. Took a long time to build this one. And unfortunately it's a POS. I've never been happy with it's performance. And it turn's out I'm not alone. Nearly everyone hates it. 

[bd139]

Shame that was a turd that one. They had it on the mark with the HW9 etc which was same era. Thanks for the pictures  .

Still regretting not nabbing that SB104 now 

[med6753]

Shame that was a turd that one. They had it on the mark with the HW9 etc which was same era. Thanks for the pictures  .

Still regretting not nabbing that SB104 now 

No, the SW7800 was much later than the HW9 or SB104. Late 80's, early 90's. Heath was on their downward slide then and this receiver was the result.