Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Cerebus]

Well there is no pride involved here, Pizza are not French at all, who cares about Pizzas here ?! 

Well Nice has the Pissaladière, a close cousin.

[mnementh]

Now that I have put a curtain, I have not made any new friends 

I have this mental vision of you trying to reverse the trend by removing the curtains. I can see a figure like a middle aged Gérard Depardieu, standing naked, stretching behind your windows, scaring off dogs and small children.   

I wish I looked as good as he did when he was middle-aged, as I'm sure do a great many of our members. If I did, I wouldn't give a flying fig who saw me in my birthday suit.

That said... I imagine V has found a happy medium, now that he's settled in here.

mnem
yeah, okay... that pun was weak at best...

[mnementh]

burglarise (is that a word?)

Yes.

Oh Ifni save us... let's not get into the whole -ise vs -ize thing. Even Even Google will give you different answers depending on the exact word and when/where you look it one up, the weather, sunspots...

For example right here, right now the prevalent answer is that burglarise is the same as burglarize, but Google nonetheless auto-corrects the search to the latter.   

mnem
The English language is as much about propagating an ever-growing list of exceptions as it is about promoting any sort of actual rules as to usage.

[mnementh]

...Now that I have put a curtain, I have not made any new friends 

What are we... chopped liver...?   

mnem
*agitating-ily*

[BU508A]

[...] if I went ot visit Italy and could not anything but Pizza machines and no actual pizza shop ! That would concern me.

If you are going to Italy and want to eat a pizza, make sure, that there is pineapple and bacon on the pizza.

 

[TERRA Operative]

Still replacing crappy IC sockets.... There are too many in this DC503 Universal Counter!

[mnementh]

I suspect this is my situation as well, although the conditions in the first sentence do not fit.  We are on the maximum length of copper.  Due to variations in weather, I also suspect the copper may not be in the greatest of shape and the insulation of it may be compromised.

Ia any part of your line up in the air on a catenary wire? Overhead cabling, even in good condition, is affected in poor weather. I used to have customers calling in for support laugh if I asked "Is it raining where you are?" but I've seen the phenomenon so often that I'm in no doubt that it's real.

DSL pushes the boundaries of what it is possible to stuff down a copper twisted pair that, crucially, is bundled without shielding with lots of other copper pairs. When DSL was first being mooted I remember a lot of engineers saying that it would be impossible to get the 2 Mbit of ADSL down a copper pair that was typically thought of as having about 6kHz bandwidth, and noisy at that. It's no surprise that if you alter the conditions then what will successfully pass over the line varies.

Of course, the other shady practices of ISPs that Vince described are well known to happen here in the GWN.  Some of which are plainly written into the contracts that ISPs provide, although I feel like I am the only person who read that far (even I did not read the whole contract...).

Maximum return on investment = getting away with sub-par service

One can't entirely shovel the blame on the ISP's greed. Back when I had to make the decisions whether it was commercially viable to establish a new point of presence somewhere, and hence had to pay for cable laying work, it cost about £150 a metre to trench and lay [direct burial] cables/fibre in a soft verge, £250 a metre to lay cabling under a pavement (sidewalk), and £500 a metre to lay cabling under a metalled road (prices circa 2000AD).You can nearly double those prices for ducting. That adds up very quickly. A back of envelope calculation says that just to get fibre/cabling from a mid street cabinet to every one of the roughly 50 houses in my road would cost £92,500. That's without backhaul anywhere. That's £1850 per house (2000 prices) before you've blow any fibre or paid for any electronics.

Add hardware, backhaul and operating costs and it's pretty easy to see that the ROI isn't very attractive. If you're competing with an incumbent who wrote down their street plant (buried cable) costs years ago and hence can set unrealisticly low prices you're stuffed.

At the risk of touching the recently-established third rail, this is a large part of why the major telcos and later data carriers spent and still spend huge $$$ lobbying/bribing/haranguing against "ISP" being classified an essential utility as telephone service once was.

Having to actually spend money as if you were a public service rather than only considering the immediate profitability of that service is anathema to these people. The fact they still don't have to when it is now so obvious how crucial a decent internet connection is to modern life... I'm pretty sure that is as much what Vince is pissed off about as anything.

Cheers,

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

Yes me too, but I guess some people like it.... here it is. The Google car / Street view has up to date imagery :

[img width= 250]https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/?action=dlattach;attach=1447726;image[/img]

I thought the French were proud of their cuisine. That is an abomination. 

Well there is no pride involved here, Pizza are not French at all, who cares about Pizzas here ?! 
I would care about Pizza mahcines if I went ot visit Italy and could not anything but Pizza machines and no actual pizza shop ! That would concern me.

But Pizzas in France, could not care less what they are like 

I don't think Zucca would come in France and expect to have the best pizzas in the world at every street corjner in France, doesn't make sense to me... just like I don't tihnk a Britt comes to France expecting to find in every shop, the best Marmite jar he has ever tasted... because we don't do Marmite here, not even our pigs would eat it, tehy would go on strike and refuse to be sliced if we dared feeding him the stuff.

Just like when I was living in England I hardly expected to find a good baguette or good cheese or anything really.. and I was not disappointed in this regard, it lived up to my total lack of expectations ! 

So I say, every country is responsible for their own shit / specialty, no less, but no more 

Besides, even if French cared about Pizzas, you can stop having ONE SINGLE man out of the millions living here, from being a greedy businessmen seeing a market / business opportunity.

Just like we have American fast food shit all over the place, McDonald and the like... does not mean we don't also have our more traditional good restaurants here and there....

It's a diverse world, one can chose to look at the crap or the good, depending on his taste and preferences...

I guess that is part of the price you have to pay for living in a small village. By the time a delivery person has rode their bike / moped from the nearest town to you, their pizza would likely be cold anyway?

[AVGresponding]

burglarise (is that a word?)

Yes.

Oh Ifni save us... let's not get into the whole -ise vs -ize thing. Even Even Google will give you different answers depending on the exact word and when/where you look it one up, the weather, sunspots...

For example right here, right now the prevalent answer is that burglarise is the same as burglarize, but Google nonetheless auto-corrects the search to the latter.   

mnem
The English language is as much about propagating an ever-growing list of exceptions as it is about promoting any sort of actual rules as to usage.

I never mentioned it; you're the one that brought it up. I think you enjoy starting arguments just for the sake of it.

[Ice-Tea]

Good enough for Shirley.

[mansaxel]

At the risk of touching the recently-established third rail, this is a large part of why the major telcos and later data carriers spent and still spend huge $$$ lobbying/bribing/haranguing against "ISP" being classified an essential utility as telephone service once was.

They're classified so here, if they've got enough customers.

[cyclin_al]

I suspect this is my situation as well, although the conditions in the first sentence do not fit.  We are on the maximum length of copper.  Due to variations in weather, I also suspect the copper may not be in the greatest of shape and the insulation of it may be compromised.

Ia any part of your line up in the air on a catenary wire? Overhead cabling, even in good condition, is affected in poor weather. I used to have customers calling in for support laugh if I asked "Is it raining where you are?" but I've seen the phenomenon so often that I'm in no doubt that it's real.

DSL pushes the boundaries of what it is possible to stuff down a copper twisted pair that, crucially, is bundled without shielding with lots of other copper pairs. When DSL was first being mooted I remember a lot of engineers saying that it would be impossible to get the 2 Mbit of ADSL down a copper pair that was typically thought of as having about 6kHz bandwidth, and noisy at that. It's no surprise that if you alter the conditions then what will successfully pass over the line varies.

Yes, it is a catenary copper wire.  From what I gather from others who have different lines in the same municipality, is that mine is worse so I assume a catenary wire that is in unacceptably poor shape.

However, there might be something else going on with the line, as the DSL modem has been replaced three times this year.  At some point, it stops connecting to the line...

Of course, the other shady practices of ISPs that Vince described are well known to happen here in the GWN.  Some of which are plainly written into the contracts that ISPs provide, although I feel like I am the only person who read that far (even I did not read the whole contract...).

Maximum return on investment = getting away with sub-par service

One can't entirely shovel the blame on the ISP's greed. Back when I had to make the decisions whether it was commercially viable to establish a new point of presence somewhere, and hence had to pay for cable laying work, it cost about £150 a metre to trench and lay [direct burial] cables/fibre in a soft verge, £250 a metre to lay cabling under a pavement (sidewalk), and £500 a metre to lay cabling under a metalled road (prices circa 2000AD).You can nearly double those prices for ducting. That adds up very quickly. A back of envelope calculation says that just to get fibre/cabling from a mid street cabinet to every one of the roughly 50 houses in my road would cost £92,500. That's without backhaul anywhere. That's £1850 per house (2000 prices) before you've blow any fibre or paid for any electronics.

Add hardware, backhaul and operating costs and it's pretty easy to see that the ROI isn't very attractive. If you're competing with an incumbent who wrote down their street plant (buried cable) costs years ago and hence can set unrealisticly low prices you're stuffed.

Ah, the part I did not think to mention is there is no real investment.  The federal government has provided a billion dollars to pay for high speed rural internet access, with a minimum speed.  The provincial government has a similar scheme, but I am not aware of the dollar amount.  We are way below the minimum mandated speed.  There is no ombudsman or bureau to complain to.  The ISP has certainly collected the money, but not spent it in this neighbourhood.

The fibre installation is not likely as expensive as you think.  The fibre in nearby areas is a line up in the air on a catenary wire fibre.  Maybe such a fibre is more expensive as it needs to be protected differently?  They are running it using the same infrastructure as used for their copper lines and for the hydro(-electricity).

The ISP has a monopoly in the area.  The single company runs the phone system, the DSL, the fibre and 3G, LTE and the non-existant 5G...  switching services does not include switching provider.

A few people who have waterfront property do have options.  There are radio-based line-of-sight services available from the other province across the river.  It it far much better performance, but at a much higher cost.  However, one assumes that someone who can afford waterfront can also easily afford expensive internet access. Then again, the performance per cost is better.

In reality, it is probably a combination of your assessment and my thoughts (and highly likely a dose of what the dwagon suspects).

[Ice-Tea]

Hey Måns, got my message? 

[mnementh]

At the risk of touching the recently-established third rail, this is a large part of why the major telcos and later data carriers spent and still spend huge $$$ lobbying/bribing/haranguing against "ISP" being classified an essential utility as telephone service once was.

They're classified so here, if they've got enough customers.

That's awesome. I wish it were so over here; seems like a pretty much a free-for-all in most markets. 100 different "ISPs" all selling a connection from one or two different carriers. Even tho we're supposed to have a minimum of one primary and one secondary carrier, that isn't always so based on exact address, and there is rarely a third; this new place is the first time we've had a real third choice since we left San Antonio.

You type the word ISP and a zip code into your browser, and what comes after you feels like this:   

Right now, we're not even sure how much longer we're going to have this sanely-priced fiber service... my automatic billing recently changed to a new company, no longer Frontier. A quick Gurrgle indicates that Frontier of the Southwest filed for bankruptcy/restructuring 2 years ago; I have no idea if that's the same entity, or even who actually owns the hardware providing our service at this point.

mnem
But hey... we've got Hulu again!

[mnementh]

burglarise (is that a word?)

Yes.

Oh Ifni save us... let's not get into the whole -ise vs -ize thing. Even Even Google will give you different answers depending on the exact word and when/where you look it one up, the weather, sunspots...

For example right here, right now the prevalent answer is that burglarise is the same as burglarize, but Google nonetheless auto-corrects the search to the latter.   

mnem
The English language is as much about propagating an ever-growing list of exceptions as it is about promoting any sort of actual rules as to usage.

I never mentioned it; you're the one that brought it up. I think you enjoy starting arguments just for the sake of it.

Awww jeez... no.  I was just commenting on how hard it can be to get correct information on the web anymore... even something as simple as the correct spelling of a word. I was literally trying to find the least inflammatory topic I could to discuss.

mnem
I enjoy discussion, not argument.

[Specmaster]

It seems that I was right to make up those extender cables for SC110 after all, even though there were real piggies and I really had to try hard to get my tongue at just the angle. Had I not done that, it would have been even harder to find the fault as where the actual problem was right underneath the vertical board and hidden by a screening plate

It was the emitter lead of an obsolete transistor (BF199) in the differential amplifier had fractured.  Extracted the transistor, tested OK, soldered in a resistor leg to make a replacement emitter lead, replaced transistor and then carefully soldered the remains of the fractured lead to the resistor leg and tested WHOOP, it lives on.   

Now to reassemble all the boards and do a calibration check before final assembly and full photos.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

[Cerebus]

Since last we spoke I seem to have become the owner of a secondhand plug-in hybrid car, a 2016 BMW 330e.



I've just had my first, rather strange experience, of driving back from the dealers without the engine running.

P.S. Zucca, if the TPMS plays up I'm holding you personally responsible (I know you only 'fessed up to the i3, but you've dobbed yourself in it.)

[McBryce]

Yes me too, but I guess some people like it.... here it is. The Google car / Street view has up to date imagery :

I thought the French were proud of their cuisine. That is an abomination. 

The fence is there to protect the citizens from it!

McBryce.

[mnementh]

Good enough for Shirley.   

I'm guessing this is the PSU capacitor oven from that many many thousands of dollars RF gen?

Sooo... Does it chooch..?

mnem

[Specmaster]

burglarise (is that a word?)

Yes.

Oh Ifni save us... let's not get into the whole -ise vs -ize thing. Even Even Google will give you different answers depending on the exact word and when/where you look it one up, the weather, sunspots...

For example right here, right now the prevalent answer is that burglarise is the same as burglarize, but Google nonetheless auto-corrects the search to the latter.   

mnem
The English language is as much about propagating an ever-growing list of exceptions as it is about promoting any sort of actual rules as to usage.

I never mentioned it; you're the one that brought it up. I think you enjoy starting arguments just for the sake of it.

Awww jeez... no.  I was just commenting on how hard it can be to get correct information on the web anymore... even something as simple as the correct spelling of a word. I was literally trying to find the least inflammatory topic I could to discuss.

mnem
I enjoy discussion, not argument.

Yep, the ise and ize is I'm afraid all just down to which version of English you speak, if the British version which will be ise or the American version which will be ize.

This is something that my spell and grammar checker is constantly flagging up to me, so you weren't being argumentative, contrary to popular belief but just highlighting this aspect of spelling. 

[mnementh]

It seems that I was right to make up those extender cables for SC110 after all, even though there were real piggies and I really had to try hard to get my tongue at just the angle. Had I not done that, it would have been even harder to find the fault as where the actual problem was right underneath the vertical board and hidden by a screening plate

It was the emitter lead of an obsolete transistor (BF199) in the differential amplifier had fractured.  Extracted the transistor, tested OK, soldered in a resistor leg to make a replacement emitter lead, replaced transistor and then carefully soldered the remains of the fractured lead to the resistor leg and tested WHOOP, it lives on.       Now to reassemble all the boards and do a calibration check before final assembly and full photos.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Wait... what...? You mean it didn't fracture right flush with the package...? 

Damn, Spec... you got lucky! Run out right now and buy a lottery ticket before it wears off!

mnem
*currently arguing with Frustion360*

[med6753]

It seems that I was right to make up those extender cables for SC110 after all, even though there were real piggies and I really had to try hard to get my tongue at just the angle. Had I not done that, it would have been even harder to find the fault as where the actual problem was right underneath the vertical board and hidden by a screening plate

It was the emitter lead of an obsolete transistor (BF199) in the differential amplifier had fractured.  Extracted the transistor, tested OK, soldered in a resistor leg to make a replacement emitter lead, replaced transistor and then carefully soldered the remains of the fractured lead to the resistor leg and tested WHOOP, it lives on.   

Now to reassemble all the boards and do a calibration check before final assembly and full photos.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Excellent! 

[Ice-Tea]

Good enough for Shirley.   

I'm guessing this is the PSU capacitor oven from that many many thousands of dollars RF gen?

Yup.

Sooo... Does it chooch..?

Dunno. Misplaced the housing for the PSU. I would normally be winging it but I guess I got a little cold feet...

[mnementh]

It seems that I was right to make up those extender cables for SC110 after all, even though there were real piggies and I really had to try hard to get my tongue at just the angle. Had I not done that, it would have been even harder to find the fault as where the actual problem was right underneath the vertical board and hidden by a screening plate...

   https://www.amazon.com/Elegoo-EL-CP-004-Multicolored-Breadboard-arduino/dp/B01EV70C78/

Oh... and I guess right now is either the best possible time or the worst possible time to bring these to your attention... you know, seeing as I didn't think of it before you spent the money and grief making them yourself. 

mnem
*frustionated³⁶⁰*

[mansaxel]

Hey Måns, got my message? 

I did! I also realised that I'm going to need 4 new shocks, 4 new tires, a couple rear springs, some sundry rubber items, and a pair of front control arms for the car. And diagnose the ABS error that creeps up frequently...

 

My hesitance to reply solely stems from this.. And I've not seen if I got a raise this year yet..