Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Specmaster]

I had a Rohde & Schwarz power supply unit on my watchlist, a NGT 20 which is a three-channel PSU.
Channel 1 and 2 can do 0 - 20 V / 1 A and channel three can do 0 - 6V / 5A.
It had 5 hours left and no one was bidding on it. So I thought, there may be some
snipers in the background. I thought, this is a nice one so I'd give it a try.
Starting bid was 220 EUR (set my bid to 230 EUR).
Now I've checked and found that I've won the auction! 
No snipers! Where are they, when you need them? 

That's the thing:



That was the best picture, the other pictures are really crappy.

This was the auction:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/254862074944
It is a nice fanless PSU with linear regulation. Look at the huge heat sink on his back!

I expect that most that thought it was ugly as it lacked digital displays and the voltages were odd, most these days are 0-30V supplies and also the fact that is had been lying around for a few years might have deterred buyers by making them think there was a problem with it?

[capt bullshot]

OK, so now you have a SSA3032X-R and yes they also have a VNA and DTF modes.

A WiFi whip is a bit of fun but you need a funny reverse pin SMA adaptor to connect to these things then you have the chance to get the 3 main VNA measurements  you normally want from an antenna and in Realtime mode sniff your local WiFi.

VNA and DTF works, Realtime not. It's mentioned somewhere in that other thread: It shows up in the menus, but some HW is different missing so it won't work.

But any antenna is good practice for VNA mode and I did this thread about characterising antennas initially with a SVA1015X and later with its replacement SVA1032X:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/rf-microwave/what-really-is-this-antenna/

I've got a very simple antenna, just an SMA connector with a length stranded wire roughly cut to make up an FM radio antenna. VNA shows it's matched at 84 MHz

[Brumby]

On the doorstep this morning....



Wish I could get enthusiastic - but my leg is caning.


I can't even find the energy to open it.   

[bd139]

Want to try that. Packlink are based in Spain. Everyone points to everyone. Best to shit in a box and hope that gets delivered to their HQ 

But it was still the courier who fucked up, what ever you cut it up, it still comes back to them at the end.

Anyway, just because you sell on eBay, it does not mean that you have to use their shipping method, you can still use whatever method you wish.

Yeah I'm using Hermes direct now. I know Hermes actually have a half decent claims process if you go direct to them. I've used it before and got refund for £300 item next day!

But really I think I'm done with the whole selling side of things. I've just gone through the sales spreadsheet and removed what I can't be arsed with and what isn't worth sending and I'm left with £88 of stuff. I don't need the extra income and moving has gone to shit so I might as well go into full "pile my house up to the ceiling with shit" mode 

Hold my beer. eBay time 

Read my edit to the message you replied to....

-- QUOTED BELOW --

Edit;
I know that you take the viewpoint that time is money, but that viewpoint is coming back to bite you, you did the same thing recently with that yellow box junction fine (I admit it would hard to prove without supporting dashcam footage) but you had a dashcam that broke and never replaced it. I think you just roll over way to easily instead of digging your heels and make an issue over it. Stop being a Patsy, if everyone did that then these companies have no one to answer to and are free to do what the hell they like.

It's not really that. Let's throw it on the table as two points:

Firstly, think of it this way: money is time, which is subtly different. If I spend my entire time, past the initial angry rant on here, on dwelling on such issues then I'm going to have to sacrifice some time to get that money back again. That time is what is the issue and that is finite and difficult to replace because it makes you put off more important and irreplaceable things on your schedule. This involves time with things that get old and leave home. The money is almost inconsequential in the long term; while annoying i'll have clocked it up again after a couple of hours of napping in zoom calls and replying to some emails tomorrow which was inevitable anyway. So while I understand the sentiment, it's better I find to choose the battles you fight carefully because in the short term they cost time that you aren't going to get back later.

The second point is that there's no point in fighting human incompetence and lack of rigour.  I've been a software person for too long to realise that it's not worth throwing any effort into changing any outcome where more than about 20 humans are involved because the normal distribution of competence and your inability to choose individuals to do the task compromise the outcome. Same goes for Hermes. Simply put if I whinge and complain about it, at best I'm going to get a half arsed canned reply and a promise to do better which will last approximately three nanoseconds which is how long it'll take for a random Hermes sorter to drop kick a package across the warehouse.

The best you can do is avoid making decisions which hurt you through eating time or money in the future, which is probably what I'm going to do 

Edit: I'd just like to add that I greatly value the time spent on this thread, the knowledge gained and the friends made

[Specmaster]

Some impressive footage of overhead [street] powerlines arcing over:

I thought I had seen this video before but seeing as it was dated the 15th Feb, I must have seen a similar one, it was about 2 years ago and there was a spate of similar videos on YT all about electrical power lines failing and the amazing thing I thought, was that they were in the USA for some reason?

[BU508A]

I had a Rohde & Schwarz power supply unit on my watchlist, a NGT 20 which is a three-channel PSU.
Channel 1 and 2 can do 0 - 20 V / 1 A and channel three can do 0 - 6V / 5A.
It had 5 hours left and no one was bidding on it. So I thought, there may be some
snipers in the background. I thought, this is a nice one so I'd give it a try.
Starting bid was 220 EUR (set my bid to 230 EUR).
Now I've checked and found that I've won the auction! 
No snipers! Where are they, when you need them? 

That's the thing:



That was the best picture, the other pictures are really crappy.

This was the auction:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/254862074944
It is a nice fanless PSU with linear regulation. Look at the huge heat sink on his back!

I expect that most that thought it was ugly as it lacked digital displays and the voltages were odd, most these days are 0-30V supplies and also the fact that is had been lying around for a few years might have deterred buyers by making them think there was a problem with it?

If I would be a mean person, I'd probably replace the analog displays with some of these jobbies:



They are availabe in red, yellow, green, blue and white.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/272845592433

[Specmaster]

I had a Rohde & Schwarz power supply unit on my watchlist, a NGT 20 which is a three-channel PSU.
Channel 1 and 2 can do 0 - 20 V / 1 A and channel three can do 0 - 6V / 5A.
It had 5 hours left and no one was bidding on it. So I thought, there may be some
snipers in the background. I thought, this is a nice one so I'd give it a try.
Starting bid was 220 EUR (set my bid to 230 EUR).
Now I've checked and found that I've won the auction! 
No snipers! Where are they, when you need them? 

That's the thing:



That was the best picture, the other pictures are really crappy.

This was the auction:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/254862074944
It is a nice fanless PSU with linear regulation. Look at the huge heat sink on his back!

I expect that most that thought it was ugly as it lacked digital displays and the voltages were odd, most these days are 0-30V supplies and also the fact that is had been lying around for a few years might have deterred buyers by making them think there was a problem with it?

If I would be a mean person, I'd probably replace the analog displays with some of these jobbies:



They are availabe in red, yellow, green, blue and white.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/272845592433

Oh I don't know, sometimes a moving pointer is better, I personally quite like analogue meters as all to often people get hung up about the last digit changing which often happens on digital displays.

[bd139]

I had a Rohde & Schwarz power supply unit on my watchlist, a NGT 20 which is a three-channel PSU.
Channel 1 and 2 can do 0 - 20 V / 1 A and channel three can do 0 - 6V / 5A.
It had 5 hours left and no one was bidding on it. So I thought, there may be some
snipers in the background. I thought, this is a nice one so I'd give it a try.
Starting bid was 220 EUR (set my bid to 230 EUR).
Now I've checked and found that I've won the auction! 
No snipers! Where are they, when you need them? 

That's the thing:



That was the best picture, the other pictures are really crappy.

This was the auction:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/254862074944
It is a nice fanless PSU with linear regulation. Look at the huge heat sink on his back!

Very nice looking power supply.

This has brought some confusion of my German understanding. Strom appears to be used interchangeably as current, stream, electricity, river, probably more things. 

Adding some Massiv In Mensch to confuse it further  https://youtu.be/ks9WuDslcwE

[tautech]

OK, so now you have a SSA3032X-R and yes they also have a VNA and DTF modes.

A WiFi whip is a bit of fun but you need a funny reverse pin SMA adaptor to connect to these things then you have the chance to get the 3 main VNA measurements  you normally want from an antenna and in Realtime mode sniff your local WiFi.

VNA and DTF works, Realtime not. It's mentioned somewhere in that other thread: It shows up in the menus, but some HW is different missing so it won't work.

Ok so SVA1032X only then. Use SVA1032X firmware for it then.

But any antenna is good practice for VNA mode and I did this thread about characterising antennas initially with a SVA1015X and later with its replacement SVA1032X:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/rf-microwave/what-really-is-this-antenna/

I've got a very simple antenna, just an SMA connector with a length stranded wire roughly cut to make up an FM radio antenna. VNA shows it's matched at 84 MHz

Some tips to configure and use your SVA
System settings change the screenshot to Normal not Inverted.
Use Preset occasionally to remove any previous settings.

[Specmaster]

@bd139
That is what a lot of shady companies these days are relying on happening when the proverbial shit hits the fan. They are hoping that the complainants will give up and cut their losses and not press home their claim. I have in the past on many occasions had some good results when complaining about harsh treatments, in particular to with parking fines where I considered then to either wrongly issued, or issued because of other factors that their cameras / wardens could not / would not take into account. For example, in a multi story car park at the London Royal Free Hospital, camera controlled car park. I saw no point whatsoever in pulling out of my parking bay to join a queue trying to exit via the only exit, which was blocked due to stationary traffic on the road outside preventing any further progress.

On another occasion I was in a hotel car park, camera controlled attending a business meeting in one of their meeting rooms, hired for the day, and I was a few minutes late in topping up the meter at the pay point during the all day meeting. It later transpired that guests in the hotel using the hotel facilities were supposed to be exempt anyway. 

I have also had to admit defeat on a couple of occasions however, and one of those was with Yodel who claimed that they did indeed make the delivery to me and showed me the tracking of their GPS tracked van which was in my post code, but the van was infact shown on their tracking system as being in a road 70 yards away  which is only 2 houses with very short gardens away at the point where the driver can remember dropping a parcel off. The driver did retrace his steps and went to the other house to reclaim the parcel, but they claimed it was theirs. At least I made them do some work trying to resolve it. It did leave a nasty taste in my mouth though as it was a radio that I had purchased for my mum on her deathbed that she was so looking forward to getting.

[Cerebus]

Some impressive footage of overhead [street] powerlines arcing over:

I thought I had seen this video before but seeing as it was dated the 15th Feb, I must have seen a similar one, it was about 2 years ago and there was a spate of similar videos on YT all about electrical power lines failing and the amazing thing I thought, was that they were in the USA for some reason?

This was in New Orleans where they'd normally expect an overnight minimum of 10ºC in February, they're expecting -2ºC tonight. I suspect that they are experiencing system loads that are well above the normal for the time of year, possibly beyond annual peak loads, as people have been turning heating up to the max. They're not quite as shocked as the Texans who've been waking up going "Whut's all th' white stuff in ma yard, an' who put it thar?", but it's close.

The American power grid as whole is acknowledged to be pretty fragile thanks to endemic underspending on infrastructure. It's the same story of underinvestment around much of the world, but America seems to be worse. God knows what we'll all do when a gazillion e-vehicles get added to the grid as well in coming years.

[mnementh]

We'll pay for those decades-overdue upgrades to that infrastructure in the form of tax breaks and direct federal subsidies for the biggest pirates on the fucking planet, that's what we'll do. And we'll still get approx 10% of what we pay for, as usual. 

mnem
*punt*

[Neomys Sapiens]

Procrastination gets me nowhere. So I just threw a substantial amount of money at Peak Electronics for a
ESR70
DCA75
LCR45
and a complete set of accessories.
will probably add the Zener and SCR testers soon.
Luckily, the discount code which was announced to be valid until 20210131 did still work.

BTW, is someone interested in a slightly used DCA55?

[Neomys Sapiens]

I had a Rohde & Schwarz power supply unit on my watchlist, a NGT 20 which is a three-channel PSU.
Channel 1 and 2 can do 0 - 20 V / 1 A and channel three can do 0 - 6V / 5A.
It had 5 hours left and no one was bidding on it. So I thought, there may be some
snipers in the background. I thought, this is a nice one so I'd give it a try.
Starting bid was 220 EUR (set my bid to 230 EUR).
Now I've checked and found that I've won the auction! 
No snipers! Where are they, when you need them? 

That's the thing:



That was the best picture, the other pictures are really crappy.

This was the auction:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/254862074944
It is a nice fanless PSU with linear regulation. Look at the huge heat sink on his back!

Do schau her, der Beschwerbaer! (Ursus complainius)

I'm missing a smiley blowing a raspberry at someone. Really. How many 2+1 laboratory supplies (from reputable manufacturers) which can do even asymetric tracking did you have before?
So, its about time you get one!

[med6753]

I finally heard from Mouser. Got this tonight....

Your order has been delayed. Unexpected peak volume, severe weather, and COVID prevention measures have created delays in order processing. Due to weather conditions at our distribution center and at package handling facilities, UPS, FEDEX and DHL has suspended operations until February 16. 
Order Status

Sales Order No: 253622698
Purchase Order No:
Order Date: Feb 13, 2021

Status as of February 15, 2021: 
Warehouse Processing

Expected to Ship By:
February 22, 2021

As soon as your order is shipped, you will receive a Shipment Notification email.
We are working as quickly as possible to ship your order, we expect your order to be shipped by February 22.

[Cerebus]

Your order has been delayed. Unexpected peak volume, severe weather, and COVID prevention measures have created delays in order processing. Due to weather conditions at our distribution center and at package handling facilities, UPS, FEDEX and DHL has suspended operations until February 16. 

That's what you get for ordering from snowy old Texas, now if you'd gone to Digikey in Minnesota where they know what the white stuff is they'd have probably just sent it out to you with a boy on a mule. 

[mnementh]

Yeah, but then he'd have to feed the mule. And the boy.

mnem
I know, I know... he could always feed the mule to the boy...

[mnementh]

I had a Rohde & Schwarz power supply unit on my watchlist, a NGT 20 which is a three-channel PSU.
Channel 1 and 2 can do 0 - 20 V / 1 A and channel three can do 0 - 6V / 5A.
It had 5 hours left and no one was bidding on it. So I thought, there may be some
snipers in the background. I thought, this is a nice one so I'd give it a try.
Starting bid was 220 EUR (set my bid to 230 EUR).
Now I've checked and found that I've won the auction! 
No snipers! Where are they, when you need them? 

That's the thing:   

That was the best picture, the other pictures are really crappy. This was the auction:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/254862074944
It is a nice fanless PSU with linear regulation. Look at the huge heat sink on his back!

Do schau her, der Beschwerbaer! (Ursus complainius)

I'm missing a smiley blowing a raspberry at someone. Really. How many 2+1 laboratory supplies (from reputable manufacturers) which can do even asymetric tracking did you have before?   So, its about time you get one!

Here ya go...    I keep a reserve stock on page 1139.

mnem
*heeds Hypnos' call*   

[GreyWoolfe]

Brumby, I feel for ya.  2 years ago, spent a weekend in the hospital hooked up to IV antibiotics only to get oral antibiotics after they cut me loose.  I don't remember pain so much as really bad itching but then my remember breaks regularly.

Mnem, my company has supplied my phone and they don't have my personal phone.  When the day is done, the day is done.  Anything past 1700 hours is OT, period, no exceptions.

[syau]

Your order has been delayed. Unexpected peak volume, severe weather, and COVID prevention measures have created delays in order processing. Due to weather conditions at our distribution center and at package handling facilities, UPS, FEDEX and DHL has suspended operations until February 16. 

That's what you get for ordering from snowy old Texas, now if you'd gone to Digikey in Minnesota where they know what the white stuff is they'd have probably just sent it out to you with a boy on a mule. 

Ordered on 15 Feb from Mouser and the expected shipment date is also 22 Feb 

[mansaxel]

Very nice looking power supply.

This has brought some confusion of my German understanding. Strom appears to be used interchangeably as current, stream, electricity, river, probably more things. 

Adding some Massiv In Mensch to confuse it further  https://youtu.be/ks9WuDslcwE

Yes, it's the same in Swedish; "ström" is related to "stream" in English, and "Strom" in German (as is "Strøm" in Danish, btw.) At least for Swedish and German, "Ström"/"Strom" also are sometimes used as one would "Mains" in English. "Der Strom ist aus" / "Strömmen har gått" / "The mains is out". Also, the situations where English would use "stream" or "current" are covered -- mostly -- by "Strom" / "ström". For "current" this of course also covers electrical current. 

Suffice to say, we've got the "water flow analogy in current theory" living in-language!

[AVGresponding]

Have you been changing out lots of them because they are really unreliable or something?

David

No, this is just as part of a scheduled rewire/refit, which is invariably a blunt instrument here, and can bag you some nice fittings from time to time. The ones I took out are identical to the one you pictured, with the possible exception of the battery; these are a slightly older 3S sub-C Ni-Cd pack, and newer ones will have 1S Li-ion packs.

However, during my time on the maintenance side, doing the fire alarm and EL testing I did notice that the cheaper LED fittings (even when from well known manufacturers) are appallingly unreliable, way more so than older fluo jobbies.

[Saskia]

Procrastination gets me nowhere. So I just threw a substantial amount of money at Peak Electronics for a

BTW, is someone interested in a slightly used DCA55?

potentially yes

[Saskia]

in other news, Alternate acknowledged receipt of the dead graphics card today (5 days after receiving it. Superheroes ... no comment)

[BU508A]

I had a Rohde & Schwarz power supply unit on my watchlist, a NGT 20 which is a three-channel PSU.
Channel 1 and 2 can do 0 - 20 V / 1 A and channel three can do 0 - 6V / 5A.
It had 5 hours left and no one was bidding on it. So I thought, there may be some
snipers in the background. I thought, this is a nice one so I'd give it a try.
Starting bid was 220 EUR (set my bid to 230 EUR).
Now I've checked and found that I've won the auction! 
No snipers! Where are they, when you need them? 

That's the thing:



That was the best picture, the other pictures are really crappy.

This was the auction:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/254862074944
It is a nice fanless PSU with linear regulation. Look at the huge heat sink on his back!

Do schau her, der Beschwerbaer! (Ursus complainius)

I'm missing a smiley blowing a raspberry at someone. Really. How many 2+1 laboratory supplies (from reputable manufacturers) which can do even asymetric tracking did you have before?
So, its about time you get one!

That's exactly the point: I already have one.   



Edit:
Added link