Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[tggzzz]

    ..... and I don't have a TDR!

  Note alteration above.
You lot happy now?

Tee hee. Yes: happy for you

Let's hope the unobtanium tunnel diode is intact. It probably is, provided the magic shorting bar inside the BNC socket is intact. That shorting link is what causes this display, showing the inside of the 1502.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/tektronix-1502-tdr-degraded-risetime/msg1488552/#msg1488552

Other points for your consideration: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/(fixed)-tektronix-1502-tdr-repair/msg3113948/#msg3113948

BTW, if you want to lose hair, try to understand the circuit that powers the device when connected to the mains (and working battery). You are famiiar with PUJTs used in a feedback loop with over/under voltage protection, aren't you.

[mnementh]

Take two of these in a tin box and call me in the morning. 

mnem

[Vince]

Here is a rather unusual Tektronix piece of gear ?! 

https://www.leboncoin.fr/voitures/2061899528.htm

I have no idea what the seller was smoking when he redacted his ad, but must be some strong stuff for sure....  the full description of the ad does not give any hint either, just gives a mile long list of all of the features.

Any idea ? A special edition of some sort perhaps ?!

[mansaxel]

Mentioning the need to re-cap the Fluke 8060A got me wondering about my similar vintage 8021B. How many electrolytics, if any, does it have? So I opened it up and took a look. Two. Both up to the bottom right of the LCD. And verified this via the parts list. Both 22uf/16V. When I do the re-cap of the 8060A I'll do this guy too.

Are you sure there's not more caps hidden under the display? The 8060 has a few there as far as I can remember.

McBryce.

The 8060 is very different from the other meters in the 802[0-9] series, and has lots more bits and bobs. The others are much simpler, and I remember my foray into my 8022 resulting in just 3 "Krusty Kaps" found after a thorough search.

[Brumby]

Let's hope the unobtanium tunnel diode is intact. It probably is.....

..... ..... ....

BTW, if you want to lose hair, try to understand the circuit that powers the device when connected to the mains (and working battery). You are famiiar with PUJTs used in a feedback loop with over/under voltage protection, aren't you.

Oh, hell no.

[xrunner]

He is nuts. And willing to spend upwards of $20K to get them shipped to him. Wish I could throw $20K away and not even think about it. 

I'm wondering what the underlying reason is for this project. Is it a library for posterity? Is it for some business reason? Does anyone know why he wants to go through this painful exercise?

[langlv]

@Vince: haha, the guy was smoking some illegal stuff with his BMW Tektronix. I think it's rather a BMW Steptronic, which is simply an automatic transmission.

[mansaxel]

    ..... and I don't have a TDR!

  Note alteration above.


You lot happy now?

Very. TDR is such a cool tech, regardless of medium. I as posted recently finally got round tuits enough to gather all bits and pieces to actually learn the art of OTDR, as executed on our Anritsu at work.  Earlier, I've watched a 2465 being used as makeshift TDR:

The question was whether a field telephone wire drum contained 300m or 1km wire, which are the two standard lengths available in Sweden. 

The trig output of the scope was connected to the input, via a T-piece that also held a binding post adapter, to which one strand of the cable was connected.

The time-base section was manipulated so as to create a suitable trig pulse, which could be seen on the scope both as received on the T-piece directly and as a reflection from the open end of the phone wire.

Back-of envelope calculation correlating time-base to graticule count allowing for speed of light/electrical pulses in PE-insulated copper yielded "around 300m".

I, who understood what was done, was suitably impressed, while bystanders who were not as versed in scopery were awestruck.

[Vince]

@Vince: haha, the guy was smoking some illegal stuff with his BMW Tektronix. I think it's rather a BMW Steptronic, which is simply an automatic transmission.

What's ironic is that he spelt Tektronix 100% right, whereas people who ACTUALLY do sell Tek scopes for the life of them are incapable of spelling it correctly ! Even though they just have to write what they see on the instrument... it's too much to ask them, so they spell it in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways but the correct one. It's beyond me. 

[Vince]

Mentioning the need to re-cap the Fluke 8060A got me wondering about my similar vintage 8021B. How many electrolytics, if any, does it have? So I opened it up and took a look. Two. Both up to the bottom right of the LCD. And verified this via the parts list. Both 22uf/16V. When I do the re-cap of the 8060A I'll do this guy too.

Are you sure there's not more caps hidden under the display? The 8060 has a few there as far as I can remember.

McBryce.

The 8060 is very different from the other meters in the 802[0-9] series, and has lots more bits and bobs. The others are much simpler, and I remember my foray into my 8022 resulting in just 3 "Krusty Kaps" found after a thorough search.

Indeed different...

I just looked at my old pics for my 8060A and 8020B... only to realize that I had a folder named "recap" for the 8020B ?! Somehow I had completely forgotten that I had already looked at the caps on this thing ?!   I must be losing it... and I am only 44 in 2 weeks ! Not looking good for my 80's if I ever get that far...

So apparently I had one of the two caps that had very obvious signs of corrosion, the pads on both sides of the PCB were very crusty. So I cleaned the crust and replaced the cap with what I had in stock... ie 40+ year old salvaged caps. ahem.... might want to  re-open the thing and put a brand new quality cap instead. Might as well replace the other cap as I didn't back then, as the solder joints looked fine on the bottom side. However looking closely at the old pics, I think I can guess traces of electrolyte on the solder mask near the cap, component side... Yeah, will order new caps and redo the job.

Then looked at the pics I took of my 8060A. I can count 9 electrolytic caps in there. Only one is visible at first... the other 8 you can only see if you pull the LCD assembly, but that takes like 15 seconds so no big deal...

[Cerebus]

A memory aide (for anyone who'll find it useful) for differentiating the "it's"/"its" forms is that "its" is possessive, like "his" and "hers", all of which do not have an apostrophe. Granted, one could misremember the female possessive pronoun as "her's", but surely the male possessive pronoun "hi's" does not look right.

An even better memory aid is having an English teacher who for a whole term made the class stand up when he entered the room (as was normal when any teacher entered the room) and instead of the usual "Good morning class.", "Good morning Sir." ritual made us chant in unison "It's with an apostrophe means IT IS!". To this day, fifty odd years later, if I ever have a moment of doubt about how I should punctuate "its" I can hear a whole class chanting in my mind's ear.

While we're being 'correct' about apostrophes I might point out that an aide is a person who assists whereas a memory technique is spelled aid without the 'e'. You can probably blame the borrowed French "aide-mémoire" for your slip. I would were I you. 

[Cerebus]

Here is a rather unusual Tektronix piece of gear ?! 

https://www.leboncoin.fr/voitures/2061899528.htm

I have no idea what the seller was smoking when he redacted his ad, but must be some strong stuff for sure....  the full description of the ad does not give any hint either, just gives a mile long list of all of the features.

Any idea ? A special edition of some sort perhaps ?!

I saw "voitures" in the link and thought to myself "My! My French really must be getting rusty. I thought 'voitures' mean cars.". Then I followed the link. OK, not getting as senile as I thought ...

[mnementh]

It's good to see you up & aboot and agitating, C. 

mnem
*nibbling on a celery stick*

[Vince]

An even better memory aid is having an English teacher who for a whole term made the class stand up when he entered the room (as was normal when any teacher entered the room) and instead of the usual "Good morning class.", "Good morning Sir." ritual made us chant in unison "It's with an apostrophe means IT IS!". To this day, fifty odd years later, if I ever have a moment of doubt about how I should punctuate "its" I can hear a whole class chanting in my mind's ear.

Reading you all, I am stunned to realized that it is actually a difficulty for the natives to know which is which ?! 
I mean an apostrophe to me I always learned it was just a short for "it is" or "do not"... so " its " not having an apostrophe obviously has to mean something else, so I  can't possibly mix the two. Maybe I am strange... but I don't see the need to have ritual to remember something as simple ?!

What I don't master however... is when people say something like " it's changed " instead of " it has changed "..so that means "has" can represented as an apostrophe like " is ".... or maybe not ? Maybe " it's " always means "it IS "... but in this case I don't understand why they would say " is IS changed " instead of " it HAS changed "... it is  instead of it has.... happens regularly but I don't yet get when one would say " it is changed (for example) " instead of the more normal/usual " it has changed ".....  there must be something to it, either a grammar rule or some habit, but I can't figure it out on my own....

While we're being 'correct' about apostrophes I might point out that an aide is a person who assists whereas a memory technique is spelled aid without the 'e'. You can probably blame the borrowed French "aide-mémoire" for your slip. I would were I you. 

That's funny... so looks like this word has not yet fyully morphed into English, you have only partially dropped the ' e ' ! Confusing for sure, I understand the pain it must be.

Here of course no such pain, " aide " is always written this way, be it the verb or the noun no matter if it's a person or an object or whatever...

That should teach you : if you want to use a French word, just use it as is and you will be fine, don't try to simplify/modify it !!! 

That's what we do here... whenever we use an English word, we just use it as is, we don't try to French-ize it...  We pronounce it in all sorts of weird and ridiculous ways but the correct one, we often don't really know what it means... but at least we don't try to modify its spelling. Well, maybe someone can come up with an exception to that but generally pseaking speaking I would say it holds true !

A sandwich is still a sandwich, a weekend is still a weekend. OK you are allowed to write it " week-end " if you want, but still...

[mnementh]

      

mnem
"...and so begins another descent into madness..."

[Brumby]

    ..... and I don't have a TDR!

  Note alteration above.


You lot happy now?

Very. TDR is such a cool tech, regardless of medium. I as posted recently finally got round tuits enough to gather all bits and pieces to actually learn the art of OTDR, as executed on our Anritsu at work.

Not touching the O variant (sanity and wallet preclude).  Besides, the closest thing I have in that type of medium is some cheap filament they use in Christmas trees.  Even the digital audio stream I run from my TV to the surround sound system is via copper.

[Vince]

Here is a rather unusual Tektronix piece of gear ?! 

https://www.leboncoin.fr/voitures/2061899528.htm

I have no idea what the seller was smoking when he redacted his ad, but must be some strong stuff for sure....  the full description of the ad does not give any hint either, just gives a mile long list of all of the features.

Any idea ? A special edition of some sort perhaps ?!

I saw "voitures" in the link and thought to myself "My! My French really must be getting rusty. I thought 'voitures' mean cars.". Then I followed the link. OK, not getting as senile as I thought ...

Well... yes and no ! 

A " Voiture " means car most of the time, but here it's also used to refer to a train passenger wagon ! 
That said, I just had a quick look at Google and it appears even in English, at least American English, you can call a wagon a "car", just like us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_car

[Brumby]

      

mnem
"...and so begins another descent into madness..."

Just keep it clean..... even if it sucks.

[mnementh]

You know me, Brumby. 

mnem
why are you reading this?

[TERRA Operative]

Fuuuuuuuuuuu....

5065A Rubidium standard ain't kicking anything out from the physics package. Tested a bunch of other stuff and it seems to be in order elsewhere.
Time to do the up-to-2-week dance of attempting to reverse potential cell flooding.

[Cerebus]

That should teach you : if you want to use a French word, just use it as is and you will be fine, don't try to simplify/modify it !!! 

Ah, but the word 'aid' is not from French, it's from the Middle English 'aiden' (to aid, to help) and the 'en' is a classic Middle English verb ending for active verbs (which itself is a hold-over from Old English). So any spare 'e's flapping about are because the rôle of being an aide is from French, specifically from the military term aide-de-camp. So we have kept the French spelling for the French word, and the English spelling for the English word.

[Vince]

That should teach you : if you want to use a French word, just use it as is and you will be fine, don't try to simplify/modify it !!! 

Ah, but the word 'aid' is not from French, it's from the Middle English 'aiden' (to aid, to help) and the 'en' is a classic Middle English verb ending for active verbs (which itself is a hold-over from Old English). So any spare 'e's flapping about are because the rôle of being an aide is from French, specifically from the military term aide-de-camp. So we have kept the French spelling for the French word, and the English spelling for the English word.

Oh dear, it's more complicated than met the eye, I see ! 

My condolences ...   

[mnementh]

The mechanics of the English language are as much aboot propagating the exceptions to the rule as they are in any way aboot actually communicating thought and intent with any accuracy or even reasonable measure of cogency.

mnem
I prepared Explosive Runes today.

[med6753]

A memory aide (for anyone who'll find it useful) for differentiating the "it's"/"its" forms is that "its" is possessive, like "his" and "hers", all of which do not have an apostrophe. Granted, one could misremember the female possessive pronoun as "her's", but surely the male possessive pronoun "hi's" does not look right.

An even better memory aid is having an English teacher who for a whole term made the class stand up when he entered the room (as was normal when any teacher entered the room) and instead of the usual "Good morning class.", "Good morning Sir." ritual made us chant in unison "It's with an apostrophe means IT IS!". To this day, fifty odd years later, if I ever have a moment of doubt about how I should punctuate "its" I can hear a whole class chanting in my mind's ear.

While we're being 'correct' about apostrophes I might point out that an aide is a person who assists whereas a memory technique is spelled aid without the 'e'. You can probably blame the borrowed French "aide-mémoire" for your slip. I would were I you. 

"If you don't eat your meat how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"

[Saskia]

Running into a wall, are we ?