Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Ice-Tea]

Bag of 10. Should get me through the week at least 

[URI]

Bag of 10. Should get me through the week at least 

Are those new or NOS?
Would have been handy to have one after the cap inside the one of my HP 3325A blew it's guts.  (phew!)

Didn't find the exact replacement back then and frankensteined a replacement from the original one and a single filter-IEC-inlet (using a saw and a file..).

[TERRA Operative]

Not content with buying more TE, I'm now starting to build it.....

(Shameless youtube shill  )
https://youtu.be/zcgIFeHUpH8

If anyone has any ideas how to improve stability and absolute accuracy, I'm all ears. 

[med6753]

Opinions of this guy? First time for me watching him. Frankly, I'm not overly impressed. Seems to me that it took him forever to get to rule #1 when faced with dead TE, no matter what it is. "Thou shalt check the power supply voltages first"

He fusses about how the 465B is constructed and unserviceable. I'll give him that. But he fails at RTFM and it would have told him how to isolate the boards to track down the short.

He mentions how superior modern DSO's are but he fumbles with the controls of his Tek DSO like it was the first time operating it.

Am I off base and perhaps just jaded or something?

I’m not going to watch the video because quite frankly watching things like that make me want to eviscerate people with a spade these days. There are so many people without a clue. Occasionally also things magically turn into guitar amplifiers which pisses me off even more. Only Curious Marc and The Signal Path cut the mustard IMHO. Curious Marc actually had a jab at the idiots recently suggesting that only measurement was the way to work out what the pixies were up to and he’s right.

But I’m going to be honest. While the 465B is not unserviceable it is really badly designed on the maintenance front. Getting at certain bits is a royal bastard. The worst thing is the cruel wire trick where it appears to have a modular construction an the next thing you know is you find one solitary undocumented soldered wire across the entire chassis, usually when you’re about to take either the timebase or the vertical amplifier blocks out. Then there’s the rampant stupid location of the multiplier assembly and connector which requires you to take the tube out to get the thing past a pinch point. Ugh that’s what killed Tek for me.

Then again I can’t quite a single analogue scope which isn’t a complete wanker in one way or another when it comes to maintenance. Surely we could have done better?

My favourite design so far has to be the TDS210 though. That’s really nice to work on. Shame there are no schematics although it’s fairly simple so easy to trace out.

I can overlook style and delivery as long as the content is there. Not everyone has the ability for the 'spit and polish' it takes to make a professional looking video. I certainly don't and you'll never see me on YT. If the content is there and it makes sense in my mind they get a free pass.


Yes, the 465B is a service nightmare. I've had the Vertical and Time Base boards out of mine and there are several "gotchas". But it's a piece of cake compared to the older 465 (no suffix). I will never purchase one or work on one ever again. I have a parts mule in the TEA closet which will never function again.   

[Cerebus]

Only 5 hours snowing here and we already have as much as you.  The puppy has no idea how to handle this.  It is the second time in her life she has seen snow.  She was quite bewildered when she went from a full speed run to full stop when she reached the snow bank I shovelled.... and time to shovel it all back again!

People may be forgetting the conversion from a while back, which implies that  in that context when you write "puppy" people ought to read "earth moving implement". 

[med6753]

Somehow my ImageShack got hacked or something and my picture deleted and that whatever that is put in it's place. I deleted it out of my files. I took a new pix. Feel free to pass on as needed.

"Dead links" have been a problem for decades, doubly so when companies decide to "monetise their assets" that are within a walled garden. Photobucket, flickr, instagram, farcebook, PlaysForSure^TM (sic), etc ad nauseum.

That's why I, on principle, upload my photos to the same server as the text.

I was a victim of the Photobucket fiasco and I quickly dumped them. I've had ImageShack for a few years now and it costs me $19/yr and they leave me alone. I don't know how that particular picture got modified. It's not a link issue. I checked links prior to and after that pix and they are all fine. So I deleted the pix and went back to the original post and deleted the link. Took a new picture, uploaded it, then went back to that post and re-linked it. It's OK now. 

[factory]

Opinions of this guy? First time for me watching him. Frankly, I'm not overly impressed. Seems to me that it took him forever to get to rule #1 when faced with dead TE, no matter what it is. "Thou shalt check the power supply voltages first"

He fusses about how the 465B is constructed and unserviceable. I'll give him that. But he fails at RTFM and it would have told him how to isolate the boards to track down the short.

He mentions how superior modern DSO's are but he fumbles with the controls of his Tek DSO like it was the first time operating it.

Am I off base and perhaps just jaded or something?

I suppose that's him:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/profile/?u=133418

Remembered his avatar seen here in the EEVBlog.

He's also on the UK vintage radio forum under another name with the same avatar, I sent him some diagrams for the Advance TC11 counter (about three months late if I remember), I think he repaired it before I scanned them though, I didn't log in to any forum for a couple of months when a close relative passed away last year.
Couldn't see anything wrong with the first 7 minutes of the video, at least its' TEA related unlike a lot of videos posted here.

David

[Cerebus]

Hey Med, a question was asked in a Repair thread about Tek paint and I dug out this post that bitseeker put in POI's on P1 here in TEA where IIRC you posted a pic of a Krylon Gloss Bahama Sea aerosol:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg2427477/#msg2427477
Trouble is the pic of the aerosol is gone ! 

Reckon you can fix it ?

I saw, in passing, the post you're talking about. I meant to give Med a heads up of the "Will you go and please answer this?" type (and forgot to), reason being I think it's an early enough model that "standard Med replacement Tek blue" may not be the correct answer.

[factory]

Somehow my ImageShack got hacked or something and my picture deleted and that whatever that is put in it's place. I deleted it out of my files. I took a new pix. Feel free to pass on as needed.

"Dead links" have been a problem for decades, doubly so when companies decide to "monetise their assets" that are within a walled garden. Photobucket, flickr, instagram, farcebook, PlaysForSure^TM (sic), etc ad nauseum.

That's why I, on principle, upload my photos to the same server as the text.

I was a victim of the Photobucket fiasco and I quickly dumped them. I've had ImageShack for a few years now and it costs me $19/yr and they leave me alone. I don't know how that particular picture got modified. It's not a link issue. I checked links prior to and after that pix and they are all fine. So I deleted the pix and went back to the original post and deleted the link. Took a new picture, unloaded it, then went back to that post and re-linked it. It's OK now.

A smaller forum (not TE related) I was on got completely ruined by the third party image host breaking all the older pictures following a forum update, we eventually gave up on it and had to start again as part of another forum.

David

[med6753]

Hey Med, a question was asked in a Repair thread about Tek paint and I dug out this post that bitseeker put in POI's on P1 here in TEA where IIRC you posted a pic of a Krylon Gloss Bahama Sea aerosol:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg2427477/#msg2427477
Trouble is the pic of the aerosol is gone ! 

Reckon you can fix it ?

I saw, in passing, the post you're talking about. I meant to give Med a heads up of the "Will you go and please answer this?" type (and forgot to), reason being I think it's an early enough model that "standard Med replacement Tek blue" may not be the correct answer.

Well, you can rest your pretty head because it's all fixed now. 

[BU508A]

Hey Med, a question was asked in a Repair thread about Tek paint and I dug out this post that bitseeker put in POI's on P1 here in TEA where IIRC you posted a pic of a Krylon Gloss Bahama Sea aerosol:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg2427477/#msg2427477
Trouble is the pic of the aerosol is gone ! 

Reckon you can fix it ?

I saw, in passing, the post you're talking about. I meant to give Med a heads up of the "Will you go and please answer this?" type (and forgot to), reason being I think it's an early enough model that "standard Med replacement Tek blue" may not be the correct answer.

Well, you can rest your pretty head because it's all fixed now. 

*cough*     *cough*

[factory]

That said, I probably would have looked at the manual upfront, anyway, found what supply rails the thing had, found an easy spot to check them, & chased down the problem that way.

I do agree, some Tektronix gear is hard to access, but they don't have that all to themselves.
R&S are no picnic, or just about anything HP, Marconi, or Thomson.

Devices having extender boards are great, if you have them, but few of us do, making them no easier to fault find than those with a similar configuration to the 465B.

Currently, I am digging through a 1970s Yaesu HF transceiver, which has nice little modular PCBs, meant for use with extender boards.
Without such boards, howver, they are quite difficult to fault find, which is not made any easier by the occasional
board which isn't like that.

If you want harder to access then try this early transistorised counter from Racal, all the boards are soldered in to the motherboard, also manual is made of unobtainium (although several scam sites claim to have it).


David

[Ice-Tea]

Bag of 10. Should get me through the week at least 

Are those new or NOS?
Would have been handy to have one after the cap inside the one of my HP 3325A blew it's guts.  (phew!)

Didn't find the exact replacement back then and frankensteined a replacement from the original one and a single filter-IEC-inlet (using a saw and a file..).

RIFA inside. So I wouldn't dream of replacing it with anything but factory new. Fresh off Mouser.

[Cerebus]

"Dead links" have been a problem for decades, doubly so when companies decide to "monetise their assets" that are within a walled garden. Photobucket, flickr, instagram, farcebook, PlaysForSure^TM (sic), etc ad nauseum.

Easily fixed. Nothing to it. All you have to do is to invent a global Internet wide garbage collection algorithm that can operate incrementally, is guaranteed to converge and that has provisions for redundancy, communications failures, server failures and moving data to to more appropriate locations following its usage patterns as it ages. Piece of cake, I'll have it ready Tuesday^*.

^*Please note, I have not specified which Tuesday.

[Cerebus]

I do agree, some Tektronix gear is hard to access, but they don't have that all to themselves.
R&S are no picnic, or just about anything HP, Marconi, or Thomson.

Sometime in the late Eighties/early Nineties -hp- had an ah-ha! moment and realised that it was in their own best interests that things ought to be easy to assemble, disassemble and service. I suspect that they started hiring decent production engineers by the bucketload. At the time I could see it in their computers. Suddenly, with the advent of a product line refresh, everything became super easy to pull apart and put back together again - often without tools. You saw similar improvements in the production engineering of their test gear around then too and, though I never got to see any, probably of their laboratory systems as well.

[Cerebus]

Hey Med, a question was asked in a Repair thread about Tek paint and I dug out this post that bitseeker put in POI's on P1 here in TEA where IIRC you posted a pic of a Krylon Gloss Bahama Sea aerosol:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg2427477/#msg2427477
Trouble is the pic of the aerosol is gone ! 

Reckon you can fix it ?

I saw, in passing, the post you're talking about. I meant to give Med a heads up of the "Will you go and please answer this?" type (and forgot to), reason being I think it's an early enough model that "standard Med replacement Tek blue" may not be the correct answer.

Well, you can rest your pretty head because it's all fixed now. 

I didn't mean the post with the buggered picture, but the original "what colour is this" question over in repair.

[Fx: sings] "I feel Pretty, o so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and gay..."

[tggzzz]

"Dead links" have been a problem for decades, doubly so when companies decide to "monetise their assets" that are within a walled garden. Photobucket, flickr, instagram, farcebook, PlaysForSure^TM (sic), etc ad nauseum.

Easily fixed. Nothing to it. All you have to do is to invent a global Internet wide garbage collection algorithm that can operate incrementally, is guaranteed to converge and that has provisions for redundancy, communications failures, server failures and moving data to to more appropriate locations following its usage patterns as it ages. Piece of cake, I'll have it ready Tuesday^*.

^*Please note, I have not specified which Tuesday.

The nearest to that is Amazon's various services and some of the telco system data stores. Nearest != close, of course.

[mnementh]

Somehow my ImageShack got hacked or something and my picture deleted and that whatever that is put in it's place. I deleted it out of my files. I took a new pix. Feel free to pass on as needed.

"Dead links" have been a problem for decades, doubly so when companies decide to "monetise their assets" that are within a walled garden. Photobucket, flickr, instagram, farcebook, PlaysForSure^TM (sic), etc ad nauseum.

That's why I, on principle, upload my photos to the same server as the text.

I was a victim of the Photobucket fiasco and I quickly dumped them. I've had ImageShack for a few years now and it costs me $19/yr and they leave me alone. I don't know how that particular picture got modified. It's not a link issue. I checked links prior to and after that pix and they are all fine. So I deleted the pix and went back to the original post and deleted the link. Took a new picture, uploaded it, then went back to that post and re-linked it. It's OK now.

Hosting images off-site is pretty much just taunting Murphy. Attaching them directly here is an invitation to chronic . But we've pretty much got a handle on that with the "skip the first attachment slot" workaround and remembering to use [ img]your attachment's URL[ /img] tags instead of the inline image thing that has been disabled.

I'd suggest.... as the post is linked in the POI... that just for this one post, you should bite the bullet and attach an appropriately resized version of the pic directly to the post. That way, it is on this server somewhere and not subject to intardnet georestrictions, changing monetization of a 3rd-party image host, the moods of the internet Gods, the condition of Jeff Bezos' underwear, etc...

Cheers,

mnem

[mnementh]

"Dead links" have been a problem for decades, doubly so when companies decide to "monetise their assets" that are within a walled garden. Photobucket, flickr, instagram, farcebook, PlaysForSure^TM (sic), etc ad nauseum.

Easily fixed. Nothing to it. All you have to do is to invent a global Internet wide garbage collection algorithm that can operate incrementally, is guaranteed to converge and that has provisions for redundancy, communications failures, server failures and moving data to to more appropriate locations following its usage patterns as it ages. Piece of cake, I'll have it ready Tuesday^*.

^*Please note, I have not specified which Tuesday.

Some things never change.   

mnem
Note the copyright date.

[mnementh]

I do agree, some Tektronix gear is hard to access, but they don't have that all to themselves. R&S are no picnic, or just about anything HP, Marconi, or Thomson.

Sometime in the late Eighties/early Nineties -hp- had an ah-ha! moment and realised that it was in their own best interests that things ought to be easy to assemble, disassemble and service. I suspect that they started hiring decent production engineers by the bucketload. At the time I could see it in their computers. Suddenly, with the advent of a product line refresh, everything became super easy to pull apart and put back together again - often without tools. You saw similar improvements in the production engineering of their test gear around then too and, though I never got to see any, probably of their laboratory systems as well.

That design ethos came aboot (I believe) as a result of their buying out Compaq, whose PCs at the time were pretty much a paragon of toolless design, and more importantly, plastic-fantastic cases that could be redesigned and delivered on a near-quarterly basis to keep the "look" modern enough to attract the interest of the fickle public. I suspect those engineers systematically infiltrated the entire company and brought in as many of their friends as they could, at least until the psycho-bint-from-Hell-on-acid bought her way into the boardroom.

Of course, that could also just be my aging brain-cells and poor memory conflating the two converging timelines... at this late date, nothing is certain except uncertainty. 

mnem
 

[shakalnokturn]

"Dead links" have been a problem for decades, doubly so when companies decide to "monetise their assets" that are within a walled garden. Photobucket, flickr, instagram, farcebook, PlaysForSure^TM (sic), etc ad nauseum.

Easily fixed. Nothing to it. All you have to do is to invent a global Internet wide garbage collection algorithm that can operate incrementally, is guaranteed to converge and that has provisions for redundancy, communications failures, server failures and moving data to to more appropriate locations following its usage patterns as it ages. Piece of cake, I'll have it ready Tuesday^*.

^*Please note, I have not specified which Tuesday.

Although I have lost some data in that time I have also succeeded in keeping some saved web pages or bookmarks since my first encounters with internet about 23 years ago.
For a long time I used to bookmark places of interest thinking I'd always be able to return there later.
When once in a while I go through my bookmarks, most of places they link to have vanished, it turns out my not so fantastic backup scheme is more reliable than internet.

The only thing I've been positively surprised with is the emails/storage space subscribed to with "free.fr" ISP back in the days (for me)  of 56k dial-up, that's 10GB still going free of charge.

[Cerebus]

I do agree, some Tektronix gear is hard to access, but they don't have that all to themselves. R&S are no picnic, or just about anything HP, Marconi, or Thomson.

Sometime in the late Eighties/early Nineties -hp- had an ah-ha! moment and realised that it was in their own best interests that things ought to be easy to assemble, disassemble and service. I suspect that they started hiring decent production engineers by the bucketload. At the time I could see it in their computers. Suddenly, with the advent of a product line refresh, everything became super easy to pull apart and put back together again - often without tools. You saw similar improvements in the production engineering of their test gear around then too and, though I never got to see any, probably of their laboratory systems as well.

That design ethos came aboot (I believe) as a result of their buying out Compaq, whose PCs at the time were pretty much a paragon of toolless design, and more importantly, plastic-fantastic cases that could be redesigned and delivered on a near-quarterly basis to keep the "look" modern enough to attract the interest of the fickle public. I suspect those engineers systematically infiltrated the entire company and brought in as many of their friends as they could, at least until the psycho-bint-from-Hell-on-acid bought her way into the boardroom.

Of course, that could also just be my aging brain-cells and poor memory conflating the two converging timelines... at this late date, nothing is certain except uncertainty. 

mnem
 

Nope, because I saw this happening, as I said, in the late Eighties/early Nineties over the period I was running PC Magazine's labs for Spliff-Davis. The Compaq buyout was 2002. If anything I'd say it worked slightly the other way around, the retained 'Compaq' product lines (e.g. proLiant) got more tool-less and neater after HP took over.

[bd139]

Yeah had a Compaq Pro 5000 and a couple of AP230’s. Total bag of nuts. The HP units were much nicer.

[Cerebus]

It's so long ago (for reference we were seeing mostly 386 and 486 class machines) that I can't remember the specific model numbers of the Compaqs we were getting through the labs, but I will say in their defence that it was a relief, in terms of build quality and accessibility, to get a Compaq in front of you instead of the POSs that were being turned out by the likes of Gateway, and (worst of the worst) Amstrad.

[mnementh]

News flash: They're here.    We're expecting 5-10cm today. 

   This is the scene from my back door. We spent all afternoon down in that yard blowing/bagging the last of the leaves yesterday. Just in time is the word of the day!

mnem
nice pants.

Ouch!  They were forecasting 10-15 cm of snow here too but along with above zero temperatures, if that makes any sense.  The end result's been rain all day which would be great for working downstairs in the shop except I'm on midnights and I know not to try to fight with any projects when I'm on midnights because it never goes well for myself or the project involved.  Worse, one of the window regulators on my truck malfunctioned and one of the windows is stuck down.  It's got a garbage bag taped over it to keep the rain out until I can get that and another thing that broke fixed once midnights are over.  Poof.  There goes the lab budget for the next while.

It's now aboot twice that deep, and they've revised the estimate to 10-15cm here as well. Temps around 1, dropping to -2 overnight. Warming in the AM, high of 5. As we have no need to go anywhere, plan is to hide out in our little cave overnight and see how bad things still are tomorrow during the "heat of the day".

If need be, I'll drag the snowblower out... but really not ready for that particular "change of seasons" waypoint to be here YET. 

mnem

Hoser, it's C-A-N-A-D-A not T-A-H-I-T-I, WTF do you expect?     Suck it up. Be glad you have a snowBLOWER rather than just a snowSHOVEL. 

I am VERY thankful... to myself... for being perspicacious enough to buy that snowblower in the summer when it was cheap-cheap instead of right now.

Not so perspicacious was my decision to do other things instead of dragging the snowblower out from all the way in that back shed and make sure it was 100% ready in the weeks prior. "Fuck you, old man... you had at least 2 days where you just rested after battling that shed project into submission! NO ZOOP FOR YOOOO!!!"

Snow on the ground was easily 8 inches deep this morning when I woke at the (frozen) sparrow's fart with the realization that we would receive no mail or other deliveries if I didn't get my fat dwagon arse out there and at least clear a footpath to the street; fortunately it did in fact start on the third cycle of "Prime, Choke, Pull 3X" as per the instructions.

Just enough that I considered dragging it bodily up to the other shed, where I have AC for the electric start. 

With the inevitable gas-stained gloves still drying on my hands I fought its bucking, wobbly, soft-tired aggravation at being woken from that long seasonal slumber; together we cleared a path from the back shed all the way to the street. Literally just as I was turning around to go back to the new shed and air up the tires, the Postman zipped right behind me up the just-cleared path with some actual mail (not just SPAM) for me and the family. 

Once tires were aired up, I cleared the rest of the driveway, then sicced my son on the task of bringing several items up to the new shed and clearing off the car, which amazingly, he jumped right on and got to work.  ( Could he possibly be developing some form of work ethic...?) As I was putting the grumpy old beast away... no, the other grumpy old beast... (I think I may name her Bertha after my favorite old jacked-up 4xFord from a properly misspent youth) in the shed, PuroLATER (as in a week later than it was supposed to be here ), arrived with my bedframe off Amazon. Aboot effing time.

So now the misery is over and I did in fact survive it... time for a nice hot cuppa coffee and to conspire with my wife something for lunch. Then maybe a tune-up on Bertha's running gear to make her a little more docile; she's almost as much work as shoveling. Almost.

mnem