Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Kosmic]

Wow, we got 2 hot cases of TEA addiction going here. Which will happen first? Run out of money or run out of room? 

One will always happen first, usually the room.  After all, old equipment won't cost much money.  Before the money runs out, will the wife be a problem?    How does your wife tolerate TEA?

I just hide everything in the basement 

[jxjbsd]

Oh... sorry. - 哦对不起 

Gabriel: Nobody would throw such a priceless instrument in the water. -  没有人会把这种无价的工具丢在水里。

Tycho: Oh, precious child. You will be food for eBay's wolves. - 亲爱的孩子，您将成为eBay狼的食物。

That's as close as I could get. Much of the tone is lost in translation.  - 那是我所能做的最好的。大部分语气在翻译中迷失了。

mnem
 
[/quote]
Thank you, yes, translation is usually not perfect.  Perhaps professional issues can be helped by Google Translate, but it is too difficult to translate a joke.  Your picture is very good.

[0culus]

Got this "for parts or not working" PD 2005A thanks to Kosmic tipping me off to the listing. Guess what? It works! Two of the indicator lamps are dead, so someone probably turned it on and thought it was dead. It's a wee bit off according to my voltmeters, but I am hesitant to adjust it right now because it could be right and my voltmeters wrong for all I know.

Don't rush in, especially as this is close to voltnut territory.

At the very least I would use a technique the manufacturers recommend using with their 8-digit DVM after it had been unused for a while: cook it. Simply: wrap it in a blanket, turn it on for a couple of days, and check the internal temperature is ~40C. When I did that it the DVM measurements improved.

Also note that it can take several hours for naked zeners to warm up and stabilise. LM399s are much faster. My 2020 has an LM399; check your 2005.

I let it run overnight and it slowly came in on the 3455A (which is currently my best meter). It hit 8.00000 this morning. It's still not particularly stable in the last digit, so perhaps the 'cooking' option would be useful.

[Neomys Sapiens]

Here are finally somewhat better pics of the battery victim:

[AVGresponding]

Chinese <-> English translations are notoriously difficult.

Hanyu Pinyin should have been a useful bridge, but I'm sure Mao sabotaged it on purpose.   

On top of that, humour is the most difficult thing to translate, as it involves cultural references that are implicit rather than explicit.

[Saskia]

Here are finally somewhat better pics of the battery victim:

FFS ...

this looks repairable though from what I can see so far.

[tonyalbus]

Wow, we got 2 hot cases of TEA addiction going here. Which will happen first? Run out of money or run out of room? 

One will always happen first, usually the room.  After all, old equipment won't cost much money.  Before the money runs out, will the wife be a problem?    How does your wife tolerate TEA?

Yes point there....
i allways hope the mailman comes by when she is out..... damn corona 

[tonyalbus]

Wow, we got 2 hot cases of TEA addiction going here. Which will happen first? Run out of money or run out of room? 

One will always happen first, usually the room.  After all, old equipment won't cost much money.  Before the money runs out, will the wife be a problem?    How does your wife tolerate TEA?

I just hide everything in the basement 

attic here 

[Saskia]

I don't need to hide anything, my husband has no say in these matters 

[med6753]

Well I was going to get all the replacement parts into the Type 561B and power it up but I decided to do some additional checking and the whole project is on hold again.

When I blow shit up I don't kid around. D217 is shorted. Defined in the parts list as “High speed and conductance”. That really tells me a lot. Anyway Tek 152-0333-00. Luckily I found a source. Hopefully have it next week. But the good news is that Q214 is OK so I have a spare. Small consolation at this point. Oh well.   

And yes, Q219 is an inert piece of silicon dead shorted between all 3 pins. 

[med6753]

I don't need to hide anything, my husband has no say in these matters 

Damn straight. I like you attitude. 

[bd139]

@med: I imagine if that oscillator stalls while in conductance it'll melt Q219 pretty quickly. Basically the moment that the collector attached transformer is saturated.  I'd check the whole bugger out carefully before you have another fatality. Wonder if Q214 can give enough base current to overload the oscillator in conductance. Hmm.

At least they learned the lesson with the 4xx scopes by putting a fuse in there. Fortunately mostly for when the tants go short 

[med6753]

@med: I imagine if that oscillator stalls while in conductance it'll melt Q219 pretty quickly. Basically the moment that the collector attached transformer is saturated.  I'd check the whole bugger out carefully before you have another fatality. Wonder if Q214 can give enough base current to overload the oscillator in conductance. Hmm.

At least they learned the lesson with the 4xx scopes by putting a fuse in there. Fortunately mostly for when the tants go short 

If the HV transformer is damaged or shorted chances are this entire project will be down the shitter. But I think it's OK. We'll see.

The 125ma fuse isn't shown as it comes from "F9" and is on the +23V leg to the primary of the transformer.

[0culus]

Hope you can get it fixed. It's a cute little scope. It's also specifically called out as one of the pieces of test equipment for the Tek 184 alignment procedures.

[jxjbsd]

Chinese <-> English translations are notoriously difficult.

Hanyu Pinyin should have been a useful bridge, but I'm sure Mao sabotaged it on purpose.   

On top of that, humour is the most difficult thing to translate, as it involves cultural references that are implicit rather than explicit.

Pinyin is useless, just to provide a speech for children's books.  After all, Chinese is a hieroglyph, which is completely different from English.  MAO is a great character. Modern pinyin was created in his time. It seems that people have a lot of misunderstandings about him, including ourselves.

[bd139]

@med: I imagine if that oscillator stalls while in conductance it'll melt Q219 pretty quickly. Basically the moment that the collector attached transformer is saturated.  I'd check the whole bugger out carefully before you have another fatality. Wonder if Q214 can give enough base current to overload the oscillator in conductance. Hmm.

At least they learned the lesson with the 4xx scopes by putting a fuse in there. Fortunately mostly for when the tants go short 

If the HV transformer is damaged or shorted chances are this entire project will be down the shitter. But I think it's OK. We'll see.

The 125ma fuse isn't shown as it comes from "F9" and is on the +23V leg to the primary of the transformer.

Phew on the fuse. That should protect the transformer at least. The transistor is faster than the fuse though 

[mansaxel]

I don't need to hide anything, my husband has no say in these matters 

And my wife applauds and forwards my endeavours. No, her sister is spoken for

[AVGresponding]

Chinese <-> English translations are notoriously difficult.

Hanyu Pinyin should have been a useful bridge, but I'm sure Mao sabotaged it on purpose.   

On top of that, humour is the most difficult thing to translate, as it involves cultural references that are implicit rather than explicit.

Pinyin is useless, just to provide a speech for children's books.  After all, Chinese is a hieroglyph, which is completely different from English.  MAO is a great character. Modern pinyin was created in his time. It seems that people have a lot of misunderstandings about him, including ourselves.

The translation of a tonal to a sybillant language is a tricky ask.

Pinyin was intended to be a bridge between the two, and Mao had a significant input. In many ways it could be regarded as a children's book language, but then how else to teach each culture across the divide?
The sabotage I refer to is things like the d <-> t transposition. It is incredibly confusing for sybillant natives, and as I observe, somewhat confusing for tonal natives too.
Maybe it's purely accidental, but as a paid-up socialist, I suspect tomfoolery.

[Specmaster]

The 4503 is now officially off the operating table, fully calibrated and working beautifully and is just waiting for me to now juggle my stack about to slot it in, I think I'm going to have to remove a 7150+ to fit it in which now brings my tally of British made TE to 15 items and growing 

That means the Avo Model 8 MKV is back on it to resolve the calibration issues on it.

[BU508A]

That's a sore point at the moment 

Here, catch!

[GreyWoolfe]

Just now, I bought a 7104  ， which looked good, and was sold for $300.  Do I need to continue treatment?
(Attachment Link)

If it has been said once, it's been said a hundred times--You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

last line of Hotel California by the Eagles.

[Mr. Scram]

Definitely not the guilty party this time

Investment is strictly limited to business purposes only in the short term at least. Thus I'm looking at CPUs again and trying to work out if it's worth swapping the 2600X out for a 3700X. Another couple of cores would give me more VM resource and some more grunt but it's a fairly large wedge and I bought myself a nice 27" 4k monitor this month already

They just dropped the price on the 3900X in response to the Intel release, though we may not see the impact just yet. 12 cores and 24 threads of goodness and overkill is very tempting and I have money burning a hole in my pocket, but I'm going to hold out for the 4XXX series in the hopes of that being more frugal at idle. Currently it's not terrible, but there's definitely room for improvement and going to a smaller process should help things. That would also be an option for you as they've now committed to also supporting the B450 and X470 chipsets. They'll probably circumvent the issue by having two UEFI branches.

https://www.techradar.com/in/news/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-price-drop-could-take-the-wind-out-of-intel-comet-lake-cpu-sales

[Mr. Scram]

I don't need to hide anything, my husband has no say in these matters 

Hiding is for the fearful.

[Cubdriver]

Wow, we got 2 hot cases of TEA addiction going here. Which will happen first? Run out of money or run out of room? 

One will always happen first, usually the room.  After all, old equipment won't cost much money.  Before the money runs out, will the wife be a problem?    How does your wife tolerate TEA?

No wife here so that is not an issue. I am the master of my own destiny. 

Likewise.  CC headroom/available space are the only limiting factors.

-Pat

[med6753]

Aw crap, the place that said they had Tek 152-0333-00 diode doesn't. They need to update their on line inventory. So.....off to the cross reference. It crosses to a 1N4610 which is obsolete of course. The 1N4610 does cross to an NTE177. Hello Amazon. Got the last one in stock.