Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[wolfy007]

*** hp 436A Power Meter ***

Arrival today via FedEx. Packing was good. Double-boxed with peanuts in-between. Unboxing supervisor (Maxim) approved. Peanuts looked good to chew on, but request was denied.

The unit appears to be in good condition for the age. No major damage noted. She's listing to the left due to a missing rear foot. Due to this missing-foot syndrome of hp equipment, already have replacements on-hand. The transformer cover on the rear has some scratches left from some wanker removing a label. Otherwise looks good in the back.

Next up tomorrow: Will power up and check a few signals. I want to check the 220 Hz square wave drive for the sensor before connecting mine to it, no need to burn up something for no good reason I always say. 

Stay tuned for the latest updates - same Bat time, same Bat channel.

Dont forget about the RIFA cap heat shrunk behind the switch...

[xrunner]

Dont forget about the RIFA cap heat shrunk behind the switch...

Roger that (bastard things)! 

[mansaxel]

Fuck Brexit!

That about sums it up, yeah.

[srb1954]

Dont forget about the RIFA cap heat shrunk behind the switch...

Took me ages to find that one in my 436A 

[Robert763]

Sorry to hear your news, HR suck, they invariably get the wrong person to fire in my experience. Double check and make sure that they pay you everything that they owe you. 

No worries, no loss, this job (sub contractor in the aero industry mostly) and company turned into a complete shit-show in the recent years.  10 years ago they hired me to work as qualified technician in air frame quality control at Airbus, on the A350 and A400. Was cool. The company was hiring good technicians and put them in high added value positions / missions. That was my first job straight out of my year training in aviation. Thought hey that's a great start, can't wait to see what the future holds !  Sadly CEO decided to sell the company (small 100 people company), to a big 4000 people company, "TRIGO", who was on a complete different wavelength and business model : they were into very low profile people doing extremely low value missions, in the automotive industry.

For the first few years the influence of that new management did not show too much, they let us do our thing, so I didn't care too much. However 3.5 years ago we lost all missions at the Airbus plant because of marketing/ commercial reasons, so they recycled me down the road at an ex Airbus plant (now "Stelia Aerospace, and "Aerolia" prior to that), where there is no aircraft to be seen. All they do is manufacture individual aluminium parts for the aircraft. Extruded parts to make 6 meter long seat rails, machined cross beams, stamped skins panels, tubes and pipes, folded parts like brackets of all sorts, fittings, frames, stringers.... all you need to make an Aircraft. It's fun for the first 3 days. Then the reality strikes : all you do all day long is print drawings, put the parts on the table and measure everything with calipers and whatnot. Boring as hell. Was hoping 3 months later we would get back to Airbus and I could again do cool stuff... but 3.5 years later still no missisn for Airbus, still stuck with my calipers.

Last November company fired 55% or so of the people due to COVID. Negociated criteria with the Union, so had to obey these criteria. That meant they were forced to fire people that met their "vision", and were forced to keep people like me who did not fit any more. So since then, they kept harassing the "old" guys like me, the qualified techs, so they leave. Every time one of them left, they would immediately replace it with one of the guys the fired 6 months ago unwillingly. See ?  Tehy are finishing the job so to speak... firing the remaining ones they did not manage to fire in November, and calling back those that they did fire but did not want to.  Now all they have are monkeys that never went to school, have 2 neurons one of which is only par time, that literally can't read / decipher a drawing (many confuse dotted lines and solid lines...), and none of the can use calipers properly, so they measure bullshit but they don't care. Also, none of them can read a vernier. So each (numerous) time that they break their digital calipers or micrometer, well they stop working because they don't know how to use the "analog" tools...

So, I would have left anyway pretty soon, anyway.
Now they have what they want. An army of monkeys they can pay cheaply and that never complains. I am glad all this shit show is now behind them. I would not want to come back even they gave me a big rise. In 10 years all I got was a 25 euro rise, and even then I almost didn't get it, it was kinda an accident...

I prefer to be unemployed and live off of crappy subsidies, eat potatoes and pasta all day, rather than having to keep working for them !

I am now toying with the idea of giving up aviation altogether and coming back to the electronics industry. Retrospectively, it's technically a million times more interesting. Problem is, it does not pay at all.

You could try Avionics, best of both worlds.

[bd139]

Crazy pricing of the week goes to

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265277070312

I’d expect the seller to chuck their partner in for a couple of days at that price 

[tggzzz]

Fuck Brexit!

Brexit fucks!

[Robert763]

Crazy pricing of the week goes to

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265277070312

I’d expect the seller to chuck their partner in for a couple of days at that price 

Careful what you wish for. Remember the stripper granny 

[bd139]

Thanks for ruining my breakfast 

[Brumby]

.... and my dinner.   

[Wolfgang]

Crazy pricing of the week goes to

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265277070312

I’d expect the seller to chuck their partner in for a couple of days at that price 

Careful what you wish for. Remember the stripper granny 

everyday an idiot wakes up in the morning. You just have to FIND him. 

[AVGresponding]

Generally speaking they manage to find you...   

[Wolfgang]

Generally speaking they manage to find you...   

I recommend Monthy Pythons "How not to be seen". 

[bd139]

Yes definitely. That’s an absolute classic that one 

[AVGresponding]

Parcel day at chez AVG... 4 waiting at the sorting office, and one delivered just after I got back from there. I'm sure BD will note the Expanse box set with approval.   



Not shown are the screen protectors for my phone which have taken bloody ages to arrive from China. My fault, should have looked more closely at where they shipped from.   

The two RS Pro items are from our favourite RS returns reseller, for not very much. The insulation tester works but has a rather amusing fault... the test button is permanently "pressed", meaning there's spicy voltages present as soon as you switch to the insulation test ranges... have traced the probable fault to a transistor that connects directly to the test button, it's a TO-92 npn PNP     S8550, and CE measures 2.2Ω which seems unlikely. Fortunately I just stripped some of these from a board the other day, so I'll swap it out and see if that fixes it. No teardown pics for this one, it's very boring and predictable.

The current clamp has an odd fault, the jaws don't quite close on their own, which prevents it from working unless you squeeze them closed. I need to take that apart and investigate, and I will take pics of that one, as the jaws are different from a normal clamp, as it's designed for much lower currents, the mA range has a resolution of 1µA!

The Metrix was not cheap, although nowhere near as expensive as that yellow one I linked before. It's quite well specced, and has the weirdest battery/fuse access that I've ever seen.

Here's the front:



Here's the back, with the dinkiest stand I've ever seen:



Hold up, where's the damn battery compartment? Oh.... I see!

We'll just jam a screwdriver in heah, in an AvE stylee:



And off comes the front on the meter! The battery and fuses are hidden behind a rubber seal:



And a plastic shield held on by an allen bolt:



I've not seen one of these fuses before, sorry it's out of focus but I didn't notice at the time and I'm not taking it apart again just yet:




I'm off to plug the Duratool and Metcal in, and get some food. Hope to have good results to report by Discord time!   

[Vince]

You could try Avionics, best of both worlds.

Yes 20 years ago as I was still studying for my B.Eng in the UK I thought it would be cool to enter the army and work as an avionics maintenance guy on some aircraft carrier. For some reason I like military stuff and things that fly above water...strange.
But sadly the army did not recruit past 24 years old and I would be 25 by the time I graduate. Plus, my physical condition isn't let's optimum... so I would never have passed the minimum requirements for the army I would think ! So I didn't even apply.

12 years ago I finally found a decent job in an electronics company. A small one (in France most of the electronics industry is a myriad of small companies scattered all over the country side... but I like that).
Typical company, had their own R&D department, PCB production lines, and PCB assembly facility populated only by girls as always.
Customers would either ask us to produce their ready made design, or design it for them from the ground up, then assemble the boards, then assemble sometimes the complete finished product as well. So they had technician to debug and fix all the boards that failed at the test bench (supplied by the customer). I was one of them. It was cool, always learning something. Not boring either as the products were varied, from many different customers, and always interesting as the company only made low volume professional industrial stuff, not crap boring shitty commercial consumer stuff. They worked for every interesting domain : medical, energy, transportation, military... 
I remember for the 6 months that I was there, we had a couple boards detiend to airdcraft. A pwoer supply module for Eurocopter and I can't remember what else for the A320. I remember thinking to mysefl : "It's cool to work on aircraft boards but it's just a small part, would like to see the WHOLE prodcut, the aircraft itself !!! ".
So I did... after 6 months we had an agreement that they would turn my 6 months "trial" contract into a permanent contract. They did not and came up with shitty excuses. They wanted to make me another 6 month contract. Alson the paty was not as good as what they made it seem to be when I got interviewed...   So I said screw you, and I left for Toulouse 600kms south from home, and trained for a year as an Airframe Technician.
Part of the training was a 3 weeks industrial placement. Found my dream placement despite everyone telling me I would never be able to even get an interview there. Worked at " Heli - Union " ( https://www.heli-union.com/ ). I love helicopters, off-shore flying.. well they operate the largest fleet of cool helicopters in France, scattered all over the world for oil and gas transportation duties. All their aircraft come back in their maintenance facilities near Paris for their scheduled heavy maintenance. So there I was for 3 weeks, surrounded with cool off-shore helicopters (not shitty Robinsons....) with their guts all over the shop, and they even let me cut holes in them and fix them up... retrospectively I think they were a bit daring... but it went well I thought.

There they had also military aircraft because their own aircraft did not come back that often for maintenance, so they kept busy in the workshop by looking after military aircraft, and also presidential aircraft too, from all the major dictators on the planet. Not even kidding.
Got to work most of the time on my favorite aircraft : they had a "Pedro" Panther.  The military version of the Dolphin, that is based on a aircraft carrier. They are equipped for search and rescue, with a hoist and a big radar dish, and a hydraulic thingy under their belly that lock them onto the deck of the carrier so they don't end up at sea...

By far the best 3 weeks of my 10 years in aviation...

Anyway, yeah avionics would be a good compromise if I can find something locally and with a decent pay. I.e unlikely to happen, so will have to get whatever decent job I can find near home. Just built my house and still many years of work to finish it, so not going to relocate just for a job, that I might well lose for X or Z reason soon after, then have to move again etc...  Now I have a house I can call home, and am happy in actually, I have to make do with local job opportunities. You can't have it both ways ! 

Sorry to be boring but hey, it's not like I have never seen pages of aviation stuff posted on here before eh ?! 

[bd139]

Parcel day at chez AVG... 4 waiting at the sorting office, and one delivered just after I got back from there. I'm sure BD will note the Expanse box set with approval.   

Hat tip to you sir 

[factory]

Crazy pricing of the week goes to

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265277070312

I’d expect the seller to chuck their partner in for a couple of days at that price 

  Utterly stupid price*, incorrect title* (no 1801A  ) dirty & corroded, discs missing from knobs and probably a ruined storage CRT as they won't know fuck-all about it. 


CDL had a much nicer condition 181A, with the same four channel (50MHz) plug-in and the delayed timebase instead of that very basic one, it went for £28 on auction, I didn't bid as I had no where to put it at the time.  The mark on the screen is just a damaged removable mesh filter.


David

* I see where they found the listing that they copied the title & daft price from, only been rotting on ePay for three years  , one to avoid too, as intensity is at max: https://www.ebay.com/itm/142545503487

[Vince]

The Metrix was not cheap, although nowhere near as expensive as that yellow one I linked before. It's quite well specced, and has the weirdest battery/fuse access that I've ever seen.

Congratulation on the Metrix ! Have a dozen of these, I love them 
There is also a red 57Ex locally here for only 70 Euros, pristine, but the seller for some reason refuses to ship ?! Strange...

https://www.leboncoin.fr/outillage_materiaux_2nd_oeuvre/1787636254.htm

Here's the back, with the dinkiest stand I've ever seen:

See below !!!

We'll just jam a screwdriver in heah, in an AvE stylee:

OH NO !!!! 100% of my Metrix ASYC series have been ruined with screwdrivers marks all over them like you just did ! It's a PLAGUE ! 
.. because EVERY BODY just like you, did not realize that the "dinkiest stand I've ever seen" as you said, is actually NOT a stand, but the VERY TOOL that's designed to crack the meter open HARMLESSLY ! 
Drives me completely nuts 

Same tool is used to unclip the front panel to access the fuses, and also to unclip the top and bottom of the case to crack the meter open. However I can never seem to remember if one needs to unclip the bottom first and top second, or the other way around. There is an preferred order.

Specs wise yes it's excellent as it's based on the top of the line MX 56, so you get the 0.025% accuracy and 50.000 counts.

[Robert763]

Parcel day at chez AVG... 4 waiting at the sorting office, and one delivered just after I got back from there. I'm sure BD will note the Expanse box set with approval.   



Not shown are the screen protectors for my phone which have taken bloody ages to arrive from China. My fault, should have looked more closely at where they shipped from.   

The two RS Pro items are from our favourite RS returns reseller, for not very much. The insulation tester works but has a rather amusing fault... the test button is permanently "pressed", meaning there's spicy voltages present as soon as you switch to the insulation test ranges... have traced the probable fault to a transistor that connects directly to the test button, it's a TO-92 npn S8550, and CE measures 2.2Ω which seems unlikely. Fortunately I just stripped some of these from a board the other day, so I'll swap it out and see if that fixes it. No teardown pics for this one, it's very boring and predictable.

The current clamp has an odd fault, the jaws don't quite close on their own, which prevents it from working unless you squeeze them closed. I need to take that apart and investigate, and I will take pics of that one, as the jaws are different from a normal clamp, as it's designed for much lower currents, the mA range has a resolution of 1µA!

The Metrix was not cheap, although nowhere near as expensive as that yellow one I linked before. It's quite well specced, and has the weirdest battery/fuse access that I've ever seen.

Here's the front:



Here's the back, with the dinkiest stand I've ever seen:



Hold up, where's the damn battery compartment? Oh.... I see!

We'll just jam a screwdriver in heah, in an AvE stylee:



And off comes the front on the meter! The battery and fuses are hidden behind a rubber seal:



And a plastic shield held on by an allen bolt:



I've not seen one of these fuses before, sorry it's out of focus but I didn't notice at the time and I'm not taking it apart again just yet:




I'm off to plug the Duratool and Metcal in, and get some food. Hope to have good results to report by Discord time!   

The fuse is an ATEX approved explosion proof type. It can blow in an explosive atmosphere without igniting it.
The meter is an explosion proof model hence the sealed and "requires a key" (allen key  ) battery and fuse compartment and lack of high current range.

[Vtile]

     There are 4 slots for memory modules which can be ROM, PROMs or 4K (!) of RAM.   It was open archetecture. It has a real time clock.  There was a printer and  several storage options.

It could easily be used in an automated test rack or as a data logger.


 The company I was working for made ROMS for it and sold it as part of a portable system for bomb damange assement.   

I didn't work on it, but asked about all the boxes of unused HP sitting around.  When the contract ended,   I bought all of the leftover 71Bs for next to nothing and gave most of them away.   I was not allowed to get near anything besides the new in box 71Bs.  The rest was probalby classified.

Well, thanks for the info, interesting indeed !

It's incredible when you think that the HPIB bus dates back to the late '60's and is still offered today on top dollar professional gear from Tek and HP.
Ethernet and RS-232 / UARTS look like they are following the same path...  Professionals just seem to like their old stuff... consumer stuff not so much eh ! How long did the VESA and AGP video bus last, 6 months ?! 

I guess the pros are counting the beans and keeping a close eye on return on investments, whereas consumers just look for an excuse to spend money on the latest gadget, it's disposable...

Old ports just works, they are small enough for laboratory/professional use, big enough to be modifiable (hand soldered on a whim), robust as sice and proper locking mechanism, slow enough that ttoubleshooting is possible with moderate equipment. Plus the more expensive laboratory equipment the longer life span it do have. Even better handheld DMMs get easily 20 years of professional field use. Ethernet is from devil! 😁

[AVGresponding]

OH NO !!!! 100% of my Metrix ASYC series have been ruined with screwdrivers marks all over them like you just did ! It's a PLAGUE ! 
.. because EVERY BODY just like you, did not realize that the "dinkiest stand I've ever seen" as you said, is actually NOT a stand, but the VERY TOOL that's designed to crack the meter open HARMLESSLY ! 
Drives me completely nuts 

Same tool is used to unclip the front panel to access the fuses, and also to unclip the top and bottom of the case to crack the meter open. However I can never seem to remember if one needs to unclip the bottom first and top second, or the other way around. There is an preferred order.

Specs wise yes it's excellent as it's based on the top of the line MX 56, so you get the 0.025% accuracy and 50.000 counts.

  don't worry, I'm nowhere near as cack-handed (UK slang for clumsy and rough) as AvE or Big Clive. No screwdriver marks were left behind!

Thanks for the tip on the secondary use for the stand, hope I remember it if I ever need to crack the case open!

[mansaxel]

Ethernet is from devil! 😁

I beg to differ. Serial ports are important; we agree there. But only as debug and out-of-band method, to get things running on the network. As soon as you've gotten network connectivity, the serial port is just an "Oh, shit" device.

Compared to say GPIB, TCP/IP over Ethernet on an instrument is IMNSHO much better. The only thing you'd lose is some timing. Ethernet cables are cheap as chips, can be self made (but it is not economical) and reach much longer than GPIB, at speeds that simply are insane in comparison. And then we haven't introduced a switch, yet. Which is also very inexpensive.

I've got one GPIB instrument so far. I'd be happy to get more, and as soon as I do, I'll probably try getting a cable for it and bodge an adapter/bridging solution so I can talk to them from my networked computers..

[mansaxel]

I'm nowhere near as cack-handed (UK slang for clumsy and rough) as AvE or Big Clive.

I 100% believe AvE is a very careful person. The "fuggit" persona is just that, a pose. Well executed and entertaining, though.

[Vince]

  don't worry, I'm nowhere near as cack-handed (UK slang for clumsy and rough) as AvE or Big Clive. No screwdriver marks were left behind!

Phew  !

Thanks for the tip on the secondary use for the stand, hope I remember it if I ever need to crack the case open![/color][/size][/b]

It's not its "secondary" role at all.. it is its one and only purpose in life ! 

If you want a stand it's built into the rubber holster which you don't have. Same on my Fluke 11, nothing Metrix specific here...

Example pic below of the stand for these Metrix meters.

Stand is actually a bit shitty/ unstable, don't like it...