Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[tggzzz]

[airgapped] is actually the recommended way to force Windoze to install with only a local account. I'm going to copy/paste from older posts for the rest of my win10 install advice; use what you need, disregard the rest:

Of course, if you can find a legit non-OEM license from Win7/8/8.1, you can ALSO just use THAT key to activate Win10; then that license will remain YOURS in principle "til the end of time". I'm currently running on a legit Win7 .edu license from 10 years ago. 

But not XP If I ever decide I need windows, then I might hunt for a scrap machine and purloin anything I can find on that.

Good luck and welcome to the age of Winbloze As A Service...

*makes sign of the cross* Dominy, Dominy, Dominy...
[/quote]

Well, I certainly have been unwillingly serviced. Which way up is that cross?

Thanks for the other pointers; I'll look at them if it is ever necessary to use windows. Until then, I've graciously allowed it 40GB disk space, and it has taken 24GB for itself. I haven't compressed the disk since it is on an SSD and I'm having fun thinking up ways of avoiding writing to it. Hence my newfound interest in Linux LVM disk virtualisation - I suspect that I can keep the vast proportion of "application level" writes away on rotating rust away from the SSD.

I'm still gobsmacked at the speed,cost and especially size of a 1TB external USB "off-computer" backup disk.

[tggzzz]

Or he COULD just pop a blank DVD into a USB Optical drive and burn the .iso to that from ANY OS, even Chrome or Win XP. I've done it; it works.

Tried that, but I've only got IDE optical drives, and trying a crud SATA-IDE converter prevents the machine even reaching the BIOS.

Not sure whether to get an internal SATA optical drive or an external USB one. It is a big 20yo case with oodles of empty bays so I'd rather populate those than have things flapping around on wires. Unfortunately the case front is a rather nice white and all the internal drives are black. But even there, there might be options.

[bd139]

I don't actually have an optical drive these days 

[Ero-Shan]

<much snipery>

Without any further ado, here's the beef:

YEW 2558     HP3458A             HP34401 (A)        HP34401 (B)      HP 3478A         Solartron 7150  Fluke 8040A     Fluke 8060
Nom. output  min-max             min-max            min-max          min-max          min-max         min-max         min-max
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
120.00 mV    120.587-120.613     120.106-120.128    120.083-120.112  120.037-120.053  120.22-120.29   119.74-120.56   120.38

Observations:

• All of the DMM with more than 4½ digits are terrible at showing a stable value. Whether this is due to The YEW or the DMM, I can't say for sure. But remembering the readings of other measurements, I tend to blame  the DMMs for the most part.

I think what you should blame is physics. Let's look just at that 120mV into the HP3458A. You're showing a span between min and max readings of 26uV. That's just noise, an unavoidable consequence of physics and you are not going to see stable values on a sensitive enough instrument. That's 26 uV peak-to-peak, so 4.3uV rms (using the 6:1 rule of thumb). You haven't stated what your measurement bandwidths are, but let's assume that you're using the analog (as opposed to sampling) path  of the HP3458A at it's full 2MHz bandwidth. That's a noise density of 3nV/sqrt(Hz) which is an excellent figure and you can't expect not to get the "instability" you're seeing. For comparison a 50 ohm resistor sitting all on its own at room temperature is going to generate a Johnson noise of 0.9 nV/sqrt(Hz), 1k ohms 4nv/sqrt(Hz).

Obviously the full working out of noise figures is more complex than this, needing to know bandwidth, instrument mode and so on before you can properly calculate them, but as a rough calculation the above would suggest that what you're calling "unstable readings" is just basic unavoidable measurement error due to noise.

Thanks for the reminder. But if a RMS Value changes by 26 µV, the added voltage must surely be RMS, too? And I can't say for sure that I've really seen min/max.
Whatever, the noise doesn't stay at that, but rather scales with the range. This somehow just shows that more than 4½ digits serve no real purpose. At least not for the average amateur in an amateur lab.

[mnementh]

Heads up, in the UK at least it is a bank holiday weekend - so fleabay has max sellers fee of £1 until the end of the month.

So competing for my time is:

• getting effing Win10 installed
• finding out about swift nesting boxes that I could fit under the eaves (work is restarting on the outside of my house, so the scaffolding won't be up forever, I hope)
• cutting grass, brambles, etc
• repairing my newsfox rss reader, which has just blown up
• swapping a battery holder for my Tek 1502, ready for fleabaying
• getting a description of my 2465dms for fleabay, and working out shipping costs
• inevitable family crap
• daring to poke around in a faulty 1kV PSU; no schematics, no indication of how to connect it to external equipment (other than the way it is currently connected)

Just as well I'm part of the idle retired.

Well, that's "1" sorted, thanks to bd, ignoring all the crap on all the guides on the net, and using NTFS on the usb stick. "1" now mutates into "installing usable operating systems alongside Win10". I wonder how long Win10 will operate; it thinks I don't have an internet connection

Sorting "4" was delightfully easy. Locate a likely looking directory in a backup, and cp -r that to the normal place. Now how easy wouldn't that be in Windows? Which bits of That Big Mistake (the registry) have to be twiddled, and how do you resurrect it if you screw up?

Can't put off measuring the house eaves for "2" much longer I'll have a my third cup of coffee first, then I'll have to go to the post office to get milk and maybe other things the local supermarket doesn't have anymore (e.g. eggs!).

"4" is easy, provided you DIDN'T disable Shadow Copy. Just find a suitable (as in it makes sense to YOU how it organizes things) Shadow Copy browser/viewer on the internet. Sorted.

"2" sounds like a job for some disaffected teenager in your life. A $10-30 (depending on just how disaffected and just how many minutes out of his/her oh-so-busy day) STEAM or NINTENDO ONLINE gift certificate should be adequate motivation.

I have no idea what a shadow/copy browser might be, but I doubt it is relevant to newfox. That reader has the best set of ergonomics I've seen, but I don't think it works with modern firefox browsers. When I finally migrate to my new machine, I'm seriously thinking of keeping an old firefox around solely for newsfox; but we'll see.

If only finding the right nesting box was so simple. There are quite a few on the market, but most won't fit my house, and swifts are picky about where they nest. I suspect I'll end up making a few to fit my eaves, but I need to discuss that with a local expert

As for teenagers, no longer available: sproglet is working hard and surviving despite falling through the gaps between all the UK government handouts. Key phrases: newly self-employed with savings.

Best of luck to your sproglet; I know we've been entirely too lucky in this latest iteration of "the complete failure of modern society". *knocks on wood*

A Shadow-copy viewer/browser allows you to browse the VSS Shadow copies of directories/volumes that Windows7 & higher make of your system. It reserves space to do so (that System Folder you were asking about earlier) that is independent of the working OS volume. It reserves 5% of the available space for this; I personally double this to 10% because I know I can be lazy about backups. 

Win10 comes by default with Shadow Copy service enabled. (Well, it did; there was a TechRepublic on it a while back... now, not so sure) It normally makes snapshots of your HDD using differential backup whenever certain potentially life-altering events happen on your machine (like installing new apps, version upgrades, etc) and those backups can be viewed with a Shadow Copy viewer usually on a by-directory basis. If you're unsure whether a folder is shadow-copied, look at the Folder Properties "Versions" tab. You can also use this tab to restore previous versions of a folder.

I recommend making periodic "Restore Points", and doing so before you install ANY new app as well. Also, if you REALLY want to get granular about it, you can use Task Scheduler to perform periodic shadow-copies, as well as to perform a shadow-copy any time certain events occur: https://www.ubackup.com/windows-10/volume-shadow-copy-windows-10.html

Welcome to the modern age! (sic)

mnem
 

[tggzzz]

Heads up, in the UK at least it is a bank holiday weekend - so fleabay has max sellers fee of £1 until the end of the month.

So competing for my time is:

• getting effing Win10 installed
• finding out about swift nesting boxes that I could fit under the eaves (work is restarting on the outside of my house, so the scaffolding won't be up forever, I hope)
• cutting grass, brambles, etc
• repairing my newsfox rss reader, which has just blown up
• swapping a battery holder for my Tek 1502, ready for fleabaying
• getting a description of my 2465dms for fleabay, and working out shipping costs
• inevitable family crap
• daring to poke around in a faulty 1kV PSU; no schematics, no indication of how to connect it to external equipment (other than the way it is currently connected)

Just as well I'm part of the idle retired.

Well, that's "1" sorted, thanks to bd, ignoring all the crap on all the guides on the net, and using NTFS on the usb stick. "1" now mutates into "installing usable operating systems alongside Win10". I wonder how long Win10 will operate; it thinks I don't have an internet connection

Sorting "4" was delightfully easy. Locate a likely looking directory in a backup, and cp -r that to the normal place. Now how easy wouldn't that be in Windows? Which bits of That Big Mistake (the registry) have to be twiddled, and how do you resurrect it if you screw up?

Can't put off measuring the house eaves for "2" much longer I'll have a my third cup of coffee first, then I'll have to go to the post office to get milk and maybe other things the local supermarket doesn't have anymore (e.g. eggs!).

Still managing to avoid "2", this time by completing "5".

But that's given me an almost uncontrollable urge to dissect two 8-cell NiCd batteries, and spark them together into a 9-cell NiCd, so that I can complete the rebuilding of my Tek 1502's battery cage. I feel a trip to my local hackspace is in the offing, to use their spot welder.

[bd139]

BTW Windows 10 doesn't have shadow copy on by default. It only creates restore points of system files now whenever updates are applied etc. The user-mode version is called File History and it's off by default. I don't enable it as I actually sync with OneDrive. That's the "modern age" 



If i type something on excel on my laptop it appears on excel on my desktop and phone as I'm tying etc. That's how good it has got.

[tggzzz]

Best of luck to your sproglet; I know we've been entirely too lucky in this latest iteration of "the complete failure of modern society". *knocks on wood*

She's doing surprisingly well. She mutated from a wageslave into a pedlar (and pedal-er ) last autumn. Now pedaling is out of the question since customers are banned, but she can be classed as a "essential worker" manufacturing food (artisan ice cream:) ). So she's gone online and is working too hard making and delivering it in the local area.

I recommend making periodic "Restore Points", and doing so before you install ANY new app as well. Also, if you REALLY want to get granular about it, you can use Task Scheduler to perform periodic shadow-copies, as well as to perform a shadow-copy any time certain events occur: https://www.ubackup.com/windows-10/volume-shadow-copy-windows-10.html

Welcome to the modern age! (sic)

Ah. That's all too much like magic for a control freak like myself to understand and/or trust. Having almost suffered Rational's ClearCase professionally, I know how irretrievably such things can screw you. (I introduced much simpler and better alternatives for the stuff I did!).

I'll stick to the tried and true mechanisms of:

• hand backing up to external rust, whenever I feel vulnerable
• if the os blows up, just use a live cd to nuke the partition it is on and reinstall. Job done.
• having a spare partition for a second parallel operating system; great for sucking-and-seeing possible upgrades/changes before committing

That's worked fine for the past 25 years; I don't see any need for hidden "improvement".

[bd139]

LOL at ClearCase. Been there and RUP. The whole shebang. What a disaster.

My backups are onedrive and periodic to external SSD and USB stick I carry around in my wallet. The USB stick is NTFS with bitlocker encryption so if someone nicks it, meh.

[mnementh]

Or he COULD just pop a blank DVD into a USB Optical drive and burn the .iso to that from ANY OS, even Chrome or Win XP. I've done it; it works.

Tried that, but I've only got IDE optical drives, and trying a crud SATA-IDE converter prevents the machine even reaching the BIOS.

Not sure whether to get an internal SATA optical drive or an external USB one. It is a big 20yo case with oodles of empty bays so I'd rather populate those than have things flapping around on wires. Unfortunately the case front is a rather nice white and all the internal drives are black. But even there, there might be options.

Modern machines don't have optical drives; literally the only time anybody uses them anymore is to install an OS or some archaic app. Just get you a cheap USB3.0 DVDRW and leave it in a drawer until you need it. Then, enjoy the free airflow and approx 10W power savings any time the box is powered up.

There is no need to worry about "not writing to a SSD"; history has proven that the internal fault provisioning performed by the SSD firmware is more than adequate to prevent any excessive-write-cycle induced cell failure. Modern versions of Windoze are designed from the ground up to manage a SSD; they automatically configure TRIM and optimize for the topology of the particular drive at the time of install.

Seriously dude... these are all worries of a bygone era. You literally don't need ANY drives in a modern PC; just a NVMe drive bolted to the MB, let Windoze install on the first volume  and it'll run like a bat out of Hell. Then GRUB or whatever UEFI-capable boot manager for your other volumes.

It's the whole trying to do *NIX FIRST thing that's fuckerizing your install.    Windoze doesn't like sloppy seconds, most ALL of the *NIX boot managers are designed to work AFTER a Windoze install. Take advantage of that fact and save yourself a lot of  .

mnem

[mnementh]

Best of luck to your sproglet; I know we've been entirely too lucky in this latest iteration of "the complete failure of modern society". *knocks on wood*

She's doing surprisingly well. She mutated from a wageslave into a pedlar (and pedal-er ) last autumn. Now pedaling is out of the question since customers are banned, but she can be classed as a "essential worker" manufacturing food (artisan ice cream:) ). So she's gone online and is working too hard making and delivering it in the local area.

I recommend making periodic "Restore Points", and doing so before you install ANY new app as well. Also, if you REALLY want to get granular about it, you can use Task Scheduler to perform periodic shadow-copies, as well as to perform a shadow-copy any time certain events occur: https://www.ubackup.com/windows-10/volume-shadow-copy-windows-10.html

Welcome to the modern age! (sic)

Ah. That's all too much like magic for a control freak like myself to understand and/or trust. Having almost suffered Rational's ClearCase professionally, I know how irretrievably such things can screw you. (I introduced much simpler and better alternatives for the stuff I did!).

I'll stick to the tried and true mechanisms of:

• hand backing up to external rust, whenever I feel vulnerable
• if the os blows up, just use a live cd to nuke the partition it is on and reinstall. Job done.
• having a spare partition for a second parallel operating system; great for sucking-and-seeing possible upgrades/changes before committing

That's worked fine for the past 25 years; I don't see any need for hidden "improvement".

While I agree in principle... I've found that Shadow Copy is one of the hidden gems of Windoze, and it literally takes an afternoon to get a really good grip on the technology and then it becomes second nature. It can save you a MFT of grief down the road; ie, 5 minutes restoring/archiving a user's My Documents folder on a machine that had been royally reamed by one of the early crypto-ransomware virii.

Really... there IS some good shit in the middle of all the data-mining assache of the modern connected age. The straightforward nature of both Task Scheduler and Shadow Copy are two of those that REALLY require VERY LITTLE expenditure of time to get a good grasp of; you do yourself a disservice by throwing hands up in the air and saying "not worth it". 

mnem
 

[Cerebus]

Thanks for the reminder. But if a RMS Value changes by 26 µV, the added voltage must surely be RMS, too?

That's why I conclude with essentially, "it's more complicated than that" because you need to evaluate the whole system to be precise about what noise is going to get through to your reading and how it is going to get through - e.g. on the HP3458A there's an analogue measurement path (rms converter) and the sampling converter path, there's ADC aperture times, actual filters, digital filters. The main noise in the reading is most probably going to be 1/f noise and it's going to be very dependent on the exact measurement system path and aperture/averaging times whether that noise is 'averaged' in an individual measurement (in which case it would show up as rms in that reading) or whether the readings are fast enough that the 1/f noise shows up as a peak-peak difference between readings or even disappears as 'not within measurement band' for the AC reading. Messy. My numbers were merely intended as a "back of fag packet" calculation to evaluate the hypothesis "Are those reading differences likely to be uncertainty due to noise?".

[tggzzz]

Or he COULD just pop a blank DVD into a USB Optical drive and burn the .iso to that from ANY OS, even Chrome or Win XP. I've done it; it works.

Tried that, but I've only got IDE optical drives, and trying a crud SATA-IDE converter prevents the machine even reaching the BIOS.

Not sure whether to get an internal SATA optical drive or an external USB one. It is a big 20yo case with oodles of empty bays so I'd rather populate those than have things flapping around on wires. Unfortunately the case front is a rather nice white and all the internal drives are black. But even there, there might be options.

Modern machines don't have optical drives; literally the only time anybody uses them anymore is to install an OS or some archaic app. Just get you a cheap USB3.0 DVDRW and leave it in a drawer until you need it. Then, enjoy the free airflow and approx 10W power savings any time the box is powered up.

Yeah, I might end up there.

There is no need to worry about "not writing to a SSD"; history has proven that the internal fault provisioning performed by the SSD firmware is more than adequate to prevent any excessive-write-cycle induced cell failure. Modern versions of Windoze are designed from the ground up to manage a SSD; they automatically configure TRIM and optimize for the topology of the particular drive at the time of install.

I'm aware of the claims, but sometimes it is fun to overengineer for the sake of peace of mind.

Seriously dude... these are all worries of a bygone era. You literally don't need ANY drives in a modern PC; just a NVMe drive bolted to the MB, let Windoze install on the first volume  and it'll run like a bat out of Hell. Then GRUB or whatever UEFI-capable boot manager for your other volumes.

That's what I've got, unsurprisingly

It's the whole trying to do *NIX FIRST thing that's fuckerizing your install.    Windoze doesn't like sloppy seconds, most ALL of the *NIX boot managers are designed to work AFTER a Windoze install. Take advantage of that fact and save yourself a lot of  .

Oh, the linux installs have been 5 minute suck-it-and-see installations, followed by blow-it-away and try something else, to see what's least painful.

The problems with installing windows have been absolutely nothing to do with that. I'm well aware of the necessity of complying with Microsoft's "we will control the disk, we will control the data" freakery! When I'm satisfied with my understanding of how things work/interact/fail/recover, it will be Windows first, then one or more linuxes.

[tggzzz]

While I agree in principle... I've found that Shadow Copy is one of the hidden gems of Windoze, and it literally takes an afternoon to get a really good grip on the technology and then it becomes second nature. It can save you a MFT of grief down the road; ie, 5 minutes restoring/archiving a user's My Documents folder on a machine that had been royally reamed by one of the early crypto-ransomware virii.

Really... there IS some good shit in the middle of all the data-mining assache of the modern connected age. The straightforward nature of both Task Scheduler and Shadow Copy are two of those that REALLY require VERY LITTLE expenditure of time to get a good grasp of; you do yourself a disservice by throwing hands up in the air and saying "not worth it". 

What is this "crypto-ransomware virii" of which you speak? And why didn't it do an effective job of screwing the shadow copies? Fundamentally I don't have the brainpower to keep up with all these problems, even though I read comp.risks

I'm sure there are useful shiny geegaws, but there's the concept of polishing a turd.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy it appears that at the user level MS has triumphantly reinvented incremental backups to an external disk, possibly incorporating some concepts from source code control systems. At the operating system level that is more useful, since a user won't be able to understand what's happened in the OS. But I've never had a problem like that with Linux.

It also appears that they add and subtract functionality over time.

[mnementh]

BTW Windows 10 doesn't have shadow copy on by default. It only creates restore points of system files now whenever updates are applied etc. The user-mode version is called File History and it's off by default. I don't enable it as I actually sync with OneDrive. That's the "modern age" 

If i type something on excel on my laptop it appears on excel on my desktop and phone as I'm tying etc. That's how good it has got.

Yeah, that's not the Shadow Copy service; that's only the VIEWER functionality of Windoze (They removed this for some idiotic reason in Win8/8.1). The fact you have old versions shows that the SERVICE is running.

Also, as I said... it WAS enabled by default with the official launch of Win10; there was a TechRepublic on it back when. But as is their wont, MS may have changed that since then. This is the other, OTHER edge of the Windoze-as-a-service sword; which in principle, I DO Agree with tggzzz on.

But I also realize that the good old days where you actually OWNED your PC are long gone, no matter WHOSE fucking OS you run.  So now I've moved on to getting the most stuff that is WHAT I WANT, knowing that there simply is no alternative to allowing them to track you all over the intardNet. For that, as you've so rightly stated, the best one can do nowadays is to tie Windoze' feet down so it can't kick you in the balls ALL THE TIME, and then get on with your life.

It's a constant state of vigilance, randomly punctuated with slings and arrows. But that is the nature of the modern connected world; the evolution of modern OSes is a byproduct of that, not the other way around.

Bottom line is the worst they can do to you in most cases is sell you shit you don't really need; that YOU have direct control over and if you give THAT control up, shame on YOU.

mnem

[mnementh]

While I agree in principle... I've found that Shadow Copy is one of the hidden gems of Windoze, and it literally takes an afternoon to get a really good grip on the technology and then it becomes second nature. It can save you a MFT of grief down the road; ie, 5 minutes restoring/archiving a user's My Documents folder on a machine that had been royally reamed by one of the early crypto-ransomware virii.

Really... there IS some good shit in the middle of all the data-mining assache of the modern connected age. The straightforward nature of both Task Scheduler and Shadow Copy are two of those that REALLY require VERY LITTLE expenditure of time to get a good grasp of; you do yourself a disservice by throwing hands up in the air and saying "not worth it". 

What is this "crypto-ransomware virii" of which you speak? And why didn't it do an effective job of screwing the shadow copies? Fundamentally I don't have the brainpower to keep up with all these problems, even though I read comp.risks

I'm sure there are useful shiny geegaws, but there's the concept of polishing a turd.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy it appears that at the user level MS has triumphantly reinvented incremental backups to an external disk, possibly incorporating some concepts from source code control systems. At the operating system level that is more useful, since a user won't be able to understand what's happened in the OS. But I've never had a problem like that with Linux.

It also appears that they add and subtract functionality over time.

Shadow Copy is MS' answer to Schlock Mercenary's maxim that "Did you back it up?" is geekspeak for "I can't fix this." or "I can't fix this without an enormous amount of assache."

It is intended to be used in conjunction with a sensible backup plan, not as a replacement. However, as an IT service PROFESSIONAL, I am thankful that it exists, as I have no control over whether a particular (l)user is competent or a complete 1d10t. Even for a sensible user who actually does periodic backups, it CAN be useful to save a file that has suffered drastic changes been hugely updated since the last backup.

I don't see this as "polishing a turd"; I see it as "responding to the users" and their not-too-unreasonable cries that "I have a machine which can do anything automatically. MAKE BACKUPS EASIER, FFS!!!" That is, after all, the main reason of a backup regimen... to save you massive amounts of time recreating lost work, no matter how that work was lost.

Shadow Copy is the mechanism by which they do this. That mechanism was chosen to be able to work in BOTH a standalone install and a domain install; by its nature that combination imposes a LOT of restrictions on how it can work.

As to the question of "Why didn't the ransomware fuckerize the Shadow copies as well...?" in this particular case the answer is... time. I got to it before it was able to encrypt ALL the shadow copies; Windoze restricts application access to shadow copies specifically to prevent virii from being able to fuckerize them.

Task Manager suffers similar restrictions in the mechanism, on top of which it has to be managed by network group and administrative policies. It is no different from creating a daemon in *NIX, aside from the fact it collects them all into a single place for you to manage them. That REALLY is a no-brainer, IMHO.

mnem

[bd139]

I’m all outta fucks these days. The most important thing is having an exit plan from an ecosystem. That’s all you need.

[mnementh]

"Them what's not busy bein' born is busy dyin'." That's MY exit plan.

mnem
"Muddling through; it's not just a job, it's a adventure!"

[bitseeker]

I know, hence my comment.

(Ahem. This post totally doesn't make sense without its context, which I missed when replying via phone.)

Edited to append the following context

... If you want a British designed and built car, try the Aston Martin DBS Superleggera, £300,007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aston_Martin_DBS_Superleggera

Hehe. Clever pricing, Aston: £300,007

That was deliberate, the car is themed on the original car used in Gold Finger and hence the 007 on the price and also very limited production run.

[BU508A]

I've glued a red filter on top of the LED display of my crystal tester.

The zero is looking really nice. 





But then I saw that a little bit of the glue got between the upper segment of the second digit. 
I think, it's not that big issue and I'll leave it now as it is. Until it'll get on my nerves.   



If someone is interested in one of the other two filters, I can put them in an envelope. Just PM me. 

[bitseeker]

Microsoft has had plenty of time to fix all the problems now. Once it's going I find it 100% hassle free.

I'm still fighting to keep it going in that direction where I can.

Windows has had improvements, but it also still has bugs that have been there for 20+ years. For example, the taskbar's always-on-top functionality has been unreliable since Windows 95. Still broken in 2020. Grrr!

[tggzzz]

I’m all outta fucks these days. The most important thing is having an exit plan from an ecosystem. That’s all you need.

Ain't that the truth! The answer or non-answer to that question is often very revealing.

If you are in a decent organisation, the non-answer to that can scupper ill-conceived plans. But if the people proposing a plan are bribable, then it marks yyoru cards as someone that Will Be A Problem.

[bitseeker]

Since you can adjust the trickle charging current, you can probably substitute NiMH batteries. Usually, NiMH aren't a direct replacement for NiCd because NiMH require a lower trickle current.

Been wondering about that lately. I read NiCd trickle is set at 0.1C, NiMh at 0.05C. But as NiMh has higher density, wouldn't that mean that if you replace a 1Ah NiCd with a 2Ah NiMh you're fine?

My limited understanding is that 0.02C is better, but even then there can be problems with continuous trickle charging. The other issue is that the actual capacity of an "XAh" cell may only be 0.7XAh

I haven't gone far down that rabbit hole, but even if it's not a perfect solution, it should be ok if you're able to keep the current sufficiently low. Just go down as far as you can tolerate for your use case.

[bitseeker]

Heathkit IG-18 continued ...

...

Anyone want to take up smoking now?

...

So, we're looking at some cutting, filing, Fusion 360 / 3D printing for a customized adapter or bushing.

Be back soon ... 

I  your perseverance to help the poor thing live again. It's quite a zoo in there, but the progress is good.

[bitseeker]

"The most important thing is having an exit plan" — bd139, 2020