Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Specmaster]

They'll be really really expensive ropes though! 

Does the UK also have the Patriot Missile Defense? If you do I wasn't aware of it.

Shit, its no good trying to make out you don't know at this stage, they are lining up the death ray machine as we speak........

[bd139]

They'll be really really expensive ropes though! 

Does the UK also have the Patriot Missile Defense? If you do I wasn't aware of it.

No. We have PAAMS here which is similar. It actually has superior ballistic intercept capabilities to Patriot

[med6753]

They'll be really really expensive ropes though! 

Does the UK also have the Patriot Missile Defense? If you do I wasn't aware of it.

Shit, its no good trying to make out you don't know at this stage, they are lining up the death ray machine as we speak........

It's probably better if you don't. If you do......good luck. 

[med6753]

They'll be really really expensive ropes though! 

Does the UK also have the Patriot Missile Defense? If you do I wasn't aware of it.

No. We have PAAMS here which is similar. It actually has superior ballistic intercept capabilities to Patriot

So it doesn't include a tomahawk? 

[bd139]

They'll be really really expensive ropes though! 

Does the UK also have the Patriot Missile Defense? If you do I wasn't aware of it.

No. We have PAAMS here which is similar. It actually has superior ballistic intercept capabilities to Patriot

So it doesn't include a tomahawk? 

Yeah a few of them. We're getting rid of them apparently.

[mnementh]

One multimeter isn't enough.

I was thinking of a visit to a friend's place about 10 years ago.

The friend was into vintage stereo equipment and I picked up for cheap (<$20) a fairly rare FM tuner at a garage sale so I called him up and went over with it to plug it in and try it out for the first time.  Dead.  So my thought was to grab a meter and start checking voltages and he said no, he's using his meter to keep watch on a car battery that was being trickle charged inside his apartment.  It turned out he only had one multimeter and he didn't want to take it off the battery that was being charged up.

I've always had more than one multimeter even if they were just mediocre Canadian Tire Mastercraft DMMs when I was starting out because you might need one in more than one location or need to observe multiple parameters or multiple test points at the same time or have more than one project on the go, so it totally floored me that this guy who was into electronics had only one.  This was even more surprising since he used to trickle charge car batteries frequently like this which means the multimeter was occupied for hours or days at a time which automatically meant that he was totally stuck unable to do any other electronics while this battery charging nonsense was going on.

I swore I'd never get stuck in that predicament after seeing this.  I have more than one multimeter.  Way more than one!  That was the thin edge of the wedge, the start...  How many do you guys have?

Depends on how "Multi" you have in mind; I have actually several different variants of the 12864 Component Tester as well now. Plus, I've added a 3478A, MS8911 and a number of random handhelds since then.

mnem

[bd139]

5 DMM's here: HP 3478A, Fluke 8060A, Fluke 25, BM22s, UT210E

[Specmaster]

They'll be really really expensive ropes though! 

Does the UK also have the Patriot Missile Defense? If you do I wasn't aware of it.

No. We have PAAMS here which is similar. It actually has superior ballistic intercept capabilities to Patriot

So it doesn't include a tomahawk? 

Nope, thats a cruise missile 

[med6753]

I only have two hand helds. Fluke 8021B and 87 Series 1.

But on bench 1 ready to go at a moments notice: Fluke 8600A, 8050A, 8010A, two 8800A's and a Mastech MS8040.

On bench 2 a Fluke 8000A and 8505A. Siglent SDM 3055.

Not braggin....just the facts m'am. 

Oh.....almost forgot....Heath V-7A VTVM on Bench 1. 

[Specmaster]

5 DMM's here: HP 3478A, Fluke 8060A, Fluke 25, BM22s, UT210E

I've got to many to count... 

[med6753]

They'll be really really expensive ropes though! 

Does the UK also have the Patriot Missile Defense? If you do I wasn't aware of it.

No. We have PAAMS here which is similar. It actually has superior ballistic intercept capabilities to Patriot

So it doesn't include a tomahawk? 

Nope, thats a cruise missile 

Duh.....

[Specmaster]

One multimeter isn't enough.

I was thinking of a visit to a friend's place about 10 years ago.

The friend was into vintage stereo equipment and I picked up for cheap (<$20) a fairly rare FM tuner at a garage sale so I called him up and went over with it to plug it in and try it out for the first time.  Dead.  So my thought was to grab a meter and start checking voltages and he said no, he's using his meter to keep watch on a car battery that was being trickle charged inside his apartment.  It turned out he only had one multimeter and he didn't want to take it off the battery that was being charged up.

I've always had more than one multimeter even if they were just mediocre Canadian Tire Mastercraft DMMs when I was starting out because you might need one in more than one location or need to observe multiple parameters or multiple test points at the same time or have more than one project on the go, so it totally floored me that this guy who was into electronics had only one.  This was even more surprising since he used to trickle charge car batteries frequently like this which means the multimeter was occupied for hours or days at a time which automatically meant that he was totally stuck unable to do any other electronics while this battery charging nonsense was going on.

I swore I'd never get stuck in that predicament after seeing this.  I have more than one multimeter.  Way more than one!  That was the thin edge of the wedge, the start...  How many do you guys have?

Depends on how "Multi" you have in mind; I have actually several different variants of the 12864 Component Tester as well now. Plus, I've added a 3478A, MS8911 and a number of random handhelds since then.

mnem

If we are playing top trumps here, thats not enough to beat my hand 

[med6753]

If we are playing top trumps here, thats not enough to beat my hand 

Hey, shouldn't we all have oversized ego's and act like a jackass as our leaders do?   

[Specmaster]

If we are playing top trumps here, thats not enough to beat my hand 

Hey, shouldn't we all have oversized ego's and act like a jackass as our leaders do?   

Nah, all they have is hot air, but then your leader does have those black helicopters, oh shit

[Ice-Tea]

My U1252B bought it. Which sets me in the most peculiar of situations: I have no second handheld DMM. How the hell did I end up in this situation?? I clearly have not been buying enough TEA... 

[BU508A]

My U1252B bought it. Which sets me in the most peculiar of situations: I have no second handheld DMM. How the hell did I end up in this situation?? I clearly have not been buying enough TEA... 

https://www.welectron.com/Handheld

 

[mnementh]

If we are playing top trumps here, thats not enough to beat my hand 

Hey, shouldn't we all have oversized ego's and act like a jackass as our leaders do?   

Nah, all they have is hot air, but then your leader does have those black helicopters, oh shit

I'm a lot more worried about the black SUVs snatching people off the streets like something out of a Kafka story...

Those black helis and the people who keep them flying have a rather large cost-per-dustoff; the SUVs and the thugs kept on standby inside them are a quick, cheap & dirty solution which hamfisted despots like the one in the White House (and his favorite would-be Tzar) have never hesitated to use for even the slightest offense.

You and I are are far too insignificant to warrant the black helis. Sending the black SUVs, OTOH, would engender less pause than sending a intern for coffee.

mnem
"May you live in interesting times." ~Ancient Chinese curse

[bd139]

Yeah. The only fuckers I'm scared of being descended upon by are HMRC (our version of IRS) 

[mnementh]

My U1252B bought it. Which sets me in the most peculiar of situations: I have no second handheld DMM. How the hell did I end up in this situation?? I clearly have not been buying enough TEA... 

http://www.ebaystores.com/Alltest-Surplus/_i.html?_nkw=dmm&submit=Search&_sid=1080135082

 

mnem
 

[Cerebus]

The ideas for either a logo or a t-shirt design so far are quite fun to see. Keep 'em coming. And the two are not mutually exclusive. For example, the logo could go on the front in the "pocket" area and a full design on the back. I'd definitely want to have them silk-screened. No thermal transfer rubbish! So, that'd probably require a batch run.

This is one of those areas where having an intimate knowledge of the printing process(es) has to guide the design. Even the pros can get this wrong - on one of the magazines I worked on the Art Editor (who had tens of 1000s of offset litho magazine layouts under his belt) cocked up our first cover CD because he didn't understand the (two colour) screenprinting process that would be used to print them - he used font effects that required sub-millimetre registration that went wrong and text that came out blurred because he didn't understand how ink flows on a screenprint, all stuff that would have been fine on the four colour litho process he was used to.

For instance Mnem's tea-dragon is something that could just not be screenprinted with any success.



Getting those fine black lines to register with the colour would be impossible and getting that shading is neigh on impossible (on a commercial long run you might approach it with flexography and inflating 'bodies' used to hold the T-shirt). Screen prints need to be solid colours and have low registration requirements (1mm in screen printing on paper would count as very fine registration, 3mm on fabric). That doesn't mean that the design has to be blocky if you're prepared to put the work in - the classic PostScript tiger



is perfectly suited to screen printing (possibly with some tweaks to lower the registration requirements), but note that a screenprint version of that is at least an 11 colour job.

You need areas of solid colour, few colours (each colour is another screen, colours don't mix like they do with inkjet/laser printing), no shading (unless you're prepared for it to be rendered with a 10 line per inch screen), no fine lines that have to match up with other edges (overprinting fine-ish lines on top of a block of colour is OK) and 'traps' that allow abutting colours to overprint slightly. You also have to allow for the fact that the print will spread a bit at the edges of inked areas, either by soaking into fabric or flowing over the surface of previously printed colours - this also limits how fine a line is acheivable. Basically you have to aim for a design that would work if you cut it out of sheets of coloured paper and laid them one on top of the other (lighter colours lower in the 'stack').

On the subject of thermal transfer there's thermal transfer, thermal transfer, and thermal transfer. Meaning there's the inkjet thermal transfer that many of us may have played with at home, there's professional thermal transfer where specialised inks are used to generate an inkjet print using a £20,000 printer on professional thermal transfer material which can produce amazing results if done well and there's thermal transfer of cut vinyl which produces screenprinting like results but with higher density, sharper images and registration and lower setup costs (especially for multicolour work).

[mnementh]

An example:

mnem
 

[capt bullshot]

So I found this amplifier alike box at some other departments scrap box, free for take away:



Wondering what purpose it served, asking a colleague, I was told it was used to characterize some inductive components. Turns out, it's a power amplifier with some additional control loop circuitry (most left cabinet) and a bit of fan control and overload shutdown (right next to the heat sink). Most right is a power supply for these
auxiliary circuits. But no power supply included for the amplifier stage itself. At the same place I found some industrial SMPS, rated at 48V / 5A, two of them made up a useful  supply for the amp.

Now isn't this a perfect excuse to show some of my TEA in action?

First thing we need is a serious load resistor. This heat sink and the attached resistors usually sit stashed away in the cellar, since I rarely use them:


Of course, we want to know what is the input power to the amplifier:


And for sure, we want to know the output power:


And the output voltage / current waveforms (didn't need to use a current clamp here, as the amplifier has a built-in shunt and sense amplifier):


Does a nice square wave also:


Doesn't look too much TEA alike inside:

[mnementh]

If we are playing top trumps here, thats not enough to beat my hand 

Hey, shouldn't we all have oversized ego's and act like a jackass as our leaders do? 

Huhhhh? I thought this was just another assembly of our usual "Sound OFF!!" call to muster... 

mnem
"Pissing contests are for those with nothing more to offer." ~me

[Cerebus]

Underpants? 

Thanks to a member of another forum I think I may have my hands on another unfinished but complete Radcom spectrum analyser 

I thought that was going to end "... hands on a particularly large and not overly clean pair of underpants".

[Cerebus]

Underpants? 

Thanks to a member of another forum I think I may have my hands on another unfinished but complete Radcom spectrum analyser 

 

Why am I seeing: Spadcom rectum analyser...?

From watching too much AvE?

I was trying to identify a MOSFET driver on a motor control board I got the other day and I caught myself saying "Ah, it's an International Rectum-fryer part.">