Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Saskia]

you can always distill it ...

why does the Moonshine Serenade come to mind  

[tggzzz]

Worst case if it tastes like Ronseal it doesn't necessarily have to touch the tongue on the way down 

Donkeys years ago three of us stayed in a wine importers hotel near Bracknell. Before one of us found bedbugs, the importer said the only generally true statement about wine is "the more you drink, the better it tastes".

[bd139]

Donkeys years ago three of us stayed in a wine importers hotel near Bracknell. Before one of us found bedbugs, the importer said the only generally true statement about wine is "the more you drink, the better it tastes".

That made me think of Bernard Black:

[Neomys Sapiens]

Brick veneer doesn't stand up to earthquakes too well. I lived only 3 miles from the epicentre of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and on all my neighbour's houses the brick veneer pretty much just peeled away from the side of the house. However, the wooden frames behind the brick veneer generally stood up pretty well and there were no catastrophic collapses.

There weren't that many double brick houses close to the epicentre but those that were fared quite badly suffering major collapses. Brick chimneys nearly always completely collapsed.

Unsurprising. A single header thick veneer in stretcher bond is half-way to falling down to begin with. For an earthquake zone you want to build the 'veneer' in Quetta bond, which is one stringer and one header deep, has a reinforced concrete infill and when you've finished is substantially more than a veneer. Named after the earthquake prone Quetta in what is now Pakistan where during the Raj the British Army had problems with traditional brick walls falling down and had to invent a way of dealing with it. But, it's gonna cost you, so people don't do it and one little earthquake leaves you with a wall to rebuild.



Also good if you live somewhere where this keeps happening to you:



That's a double thickness wall in stretcher bond (if they'd used English bond, alternating headers and stretchers, it might have stood up better). Look quite how much has been taken out by an impact at one end. Like I say, half-way to falling down to begin with and only good for garden walls, if that.

That bond is a technique that you have hopefully not disclosed to the lbf's living there!
Might make breaching any Paki buildings unneccesarely complicated.

(*ittle *rown *fuckers)

[BU508A]

Worst case if it tastes like Ronseal it doesn't necessarily have to touch the tongue on the way down 

 

[Neomys Sapiens]

Follow-on note on my dinner, really for the UK crowd only.

The wine, "Jam Shed" 2019 Shiraz was a princely £6 from Morrisons and is very good (very, very good for £6). The tasting notes on the bottle say "Rich, Jammy and Smooth" and for once they do the Ronseal* and tell the truth. So, if that tasting note appeals to you and you're a wine drinker, off to Morrisons.

*"It does what it says on the tin", fortunately it doesn't taste like Ronseal - although I have had wine that does.

Too much of 'jammy' for my taste in most of the aussies' wine. But as they named it such you knew what you were getting.

[med6753]

I have collected mine from a combination of HAM swap meets and estate sales.  They are very handy for old GR equipment, which I still have many examples of.

Wanna sell me one GR to BNC female? I need one more and I'm good.

[Saskia]

34401a for 330 ... ok or not ? VFD ok, no leads.

[tautech]

Wanna sell me one GR to BNC female? I need one more and I'm good.

Not the male like the 6 in the LH compartment ?
Got 1 that beanflying sent me in a goodies hamper you can have as I'll never use it.

[BU508A]

34401a for 330 ... ok or not ? VFD ok, no leads.

In principle okay but this depends on how old the unit is. If it's a very old one it may have these unobtainium VFD drivers which tend to develop leakage and the display module is incompatible with newer ones.

[mansaxel]

Too much of 'jammy' for my taste in most of the aussies' wine. But as they named it such you knew what you were getting.

A lot of "new world wine" is, sozusagen, "programmatic", ie. made to a specification, which, while often succeding in fullfilling the spec does it at the expense of subtleness.  I've had a few European wines that were made with something special in mind, a Mosel Dornfelder from Ediger-Eller, for instance. "Modern" and very good. Because it CAN be good if done to a spec. It usually has to go up a bit in price, though.  I find US and Oceanian wines in the 15-20€ and up class OK. One usually finds more character and multifacetedness in 10€ wines from old wine countries like France, Germany and Italy, though.

[Neomys Sapiens]

34401a for 330 ... ok or not ? VFD ok, no leads.

Oooh, Saskia turns to the bench meters! It's neither cheap nor grossly overpriced for our market over here and the leads should not be the problem - the original ones are on offer frequently.

[tggzzz]

34401a for 330 ... ok or not ? VFD ok, no leads.

I picked up my Agilent 34410a for £400. Haven't found a fault in it yet, and I really like the "second line" display of, e.g., min/max/mean/stddeviation.

[BU508A]

For the 34401A, as a rule of thumb:

be careful, could have the old and unobtanium display drivers (all input jacks are red)


good, newer model, has the new display drivers (input jacks are red and black)


If the label is saying Agilent or Keysight, then you are definitly safe in this respect.

[bd139]

Also worth checking that the commas and dots aren't illuminated slightly - that's an early sign of failure. Also look out for display wear which isn't apparent from the default voltage mode i.e. like my old one:



Mine already had the display replaced in it as well.

34401a for 330 ... ok or not ? VFD ok, no leads.

I picked up my Agilent 34410a for £400. Haven't found a fault in it yet, and I really like the "second line" display of, e.g., min/max/mean/stddeviation.

Apart from the strimmer in the back.

[Neomys Sapiens]

Too much of 'jammy' for my taste in most of the aussies' wine. But as they named it such you knew what you were getting.

A lot of "new world wine" is, sozusagen, "programmatic", ie. made to a specification, which, while often succeding in fullfilling the spec does it at the expense of subtleness.  I've had a few European wines that were made with something special in mind, a Mosel Dornfelder from Ediger-Eller, for instance. "Modern" and very good. Because it CAN be good if done to a spec. It usually has to go up a bit in price, though.  I find US and Oceanian wines in the 15-20€ and up class OK. One usually finds more character and multifacetedness in 10€ wines from old wine countries like France, Germany and Italy, though.

Sums it up nicely, including the price ranges. Althought with reservations on the Dornfelder, as it is at the other end of the scale to what I prefer in a red:
https://www.superiore.de/wein/molise/di-majo-norante/contado-aglianico-riserva-molise-doc-2015.html

[Neomys Sapiens]

Wanna sell me one GR to BNC female? I need one more and I'm good.

Not the male like the 6 in the LH compartment ?
Got 1 that beanflying sent me in a goodies hamper you can have as I'll never use it.

Mid = GR to BNC male, GR to SMA male
Left = GR to BNC female

Or at which picture are YOU looking?

[BU508A]

I do like the dry Regent red wine.

For example this one:

[Saskia]

https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/digitalmutimeter-hp-agilent-34401a/1505319398-168-1926

it seems to be one of the old ones ...

[bd139]

Yeah I'd leave it. You might be able to persuade the seller to use the menus to get the 3-segment version number out. That has the display module version in it.

[BU508A]

https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/digitalmutimeter-hp-agilent-34401a/1505319398-168-1926

it seems to be one of the old ones ...

Yes, I'm having it on my watchlist as well. But no worries, I have one. 
If you are interested, then I suggest to ask the seller for the serial number, then we can check if it is the newer model.

Btw, my 34401A has the red-only input jacks as well but it has the newer display. Which reminds me, I should send it to Keysight for calibration ... 

Edit:
Here is a hack where somebody replaced the VFD with an OLED display. Lots of useful information in it:
https://github.com/openscopeproject/HP34401a-OLED-FW

And here is a thread discussing about checking a 34401A:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/hp-34401a-what-to-worry-about-when-buying-used/

Ah, this I was looking for: the 34401A display repair thread:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/hp-34401a-dmm-with-leaking-segments/

[tggzzz]

Apart from the strimmer in the back.

What strimmer? I haven't heard a problem.

[mansaxel]

Althought with reservations on the Dornfelder, as it is at the other end of the scale to what I prefer in a red:
https://www.superiore.de/wein/molise/di-majo-norante/contado-aglianico-riserva-molise-doc-2015.html

Au contraire! I think you'd like it, from the description on that italian wine.

"Cuvee J" from Walter Oster. Their Riesling is sublime, too, but that's a given, more or less.

[mnementh]

@ Saskia Well that puts a new slant on things and conflicts with what I have always been told. Goes to show, that we can all learn something new every day

I am not condoning everything my Country has done post WW2 but I do know this.....someone had to play world traffic cop and by default we were elected. And when you're the cop you're going to make enemies. And do dumb things. There's a whole bucket list of dumb things. But I do know this...if it weren't for a little incident in a certain harbor on a certain Pacific island you all would be speaking Deutsch today.

We're still talking about the actions of a relative few religious fundamentalist wingnuts as opposed to the actions and ideology of most of the Muslim population of the world; blaming all of the peoples of these regions for these atrocities is the equivalent of assuming that everybody in the US is a Christian religious fundamentalist wingnut who believes and acts as the KKK does, FFS. 

The reason we have this constant game of whack-a-mole is not because the hate is everywhere over there, but rather because we keep stirring shit up in someplace new over and over again over there. *SMH*

There's a huge difference between WWI/WWII and what the US government has done repeatedly in the middle East since then. Ever since the UN division of Israel & Palestine in the 50s (spearheaded by Western business interests), we have stuck our dick in their internal affairs time and time again, keeping shit stirred up for most of a century; in just the course of my lifetime it has become an obsession, as this new bogeyman justifies the incessant exponential military expansion we as a society have been chained to since we "left" VietNam.

Even as Nixon was being run out of town on a rail, we were laying the groundwork with "Charlie Wilson's War", since then, every time some semblance of order has started to emerge, we've found some new fucking pretense to go in there and stir shit up with new military incursions. Our "Endless War" over there is in fact the ends, not the means; it is the business of war and oil that matters, not a single thing more.

Bottom line is the one thing we (the West) cannot allow is for them to ever truly stand united again; the last time that happened we had the Oil Embargo, and American big oil suddenly lost the raging river of cash flow that represented. Which of course really was the end of the fucking world, because it hurt the only people who mattered. 

mnem
But hey... it opened the doors for oil drilling here in the US; and a special exemption for big oil from the Clean Air & Water Act. What could possibly go wrong...?

[mnementh]

no adoption ? sniff ..

Sure, I'll adopt you but wouldn't your hubby object to that? I know for certain I got someone over here who would have some choice words about it. 

Adopt him as well. You could say: "I'm your father" and do some asthma related breathing 

  LOLOL IRL

Aww jeez... that is just 6 different flavors of fucked-up. *wipes tear from eye*

mnem