Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Specmaster]

FedEx just brought a Mouser box with the Kria SOM which was on backorder.

Postal service dropped permanent "disabled" id for Hubby.

They also dropped off a speeding ticket. Bloody hell ....

Get yourself one of those after market Sat Navs with speed camera warnings built-in, I love mine, they also give advanced warnings of red light cameras, average speed zones and will actually calculate your average speed in real time in those sections.

[Saskia]

I was more thinking of a 5 kW Magnetron coupled with a radar detector and a directional antenna ...

[BU508A]

FedEx just brought a Mouser box with the Kria SOM which was on backorder.

Postal service dropped permanent "disabled" id for Hubby.

They also dropped off a speeding ticket. Bloody hell ....

Get yourself one of those after market Sat Navs with speed camera warnings built-in, I love mine, they also give advanced warnings of red light cameras, average speed zones and will actually calculate your average speed in real time in those sections.

Those devices are illegal here. If the police catches you with one, then you'll be fined.

[Robert763]

I've heard of barn finds (which probably aren't), but never found in a field, quite poor condition bunch of HP 174x & 172x scopes, thankfully too far away for me (in UK). 

At least one auction house stores equipment in a farm barn, the green building on the left. I've seen hessian sacks over the equipment to catch the condensation from the air.

Johns Radio in Bradford used to have a lot of "overflow" sitting in the yard in stillages under cheap polyester tarps. I visited once when the was a good 3 inches of snow on the ground and John (Townend) was madly searching the yard for a VNA he had sold bout could not find.....
They had an auction at one of his mills in late 90's that he tried to do himself. The catalog was late, no photos poor descriptions etc and them lots moved between viewing and the auction. Some stuff went dirt cheap. some of the 'scops I got for about £5 each were listed as "scope" but were the fairly modern Phillps models.
He complained bitterly later that the other dealers had conspired to keep prices low. It was nothing of the sort. He just tried to sell far too much at once with little publicity and a late poor catalog.
I stopped bidding when I judged my small van would not take any more 
I found one of his old ads from Wireless World....

[mnementh]

WNR

The WNR defines the ratio in dB between the wanted power [W] over the needed power [N] for a device that can/should be purchased or it is already purchased.



TEA members present always high levels of WNR, generally above 20dB. Generally speaking the WNR and MWC (money wasted coefficient] are in direct proportion.

In my last purchase      I measured a 62.3 dB WNR peak.

Oi... so you just couldn't resist, eh...?

You do realize that when they release the WP43S there will be some HW difference that makes it still better to buy it as a native WP43S rather than upgrading this one, right...?

There always is; just as sure as scope creep and PHBs right up in your face when you walk through the door on Monday morning... 

mnem

[Robert763]

Just to prove I dont buy ALL the current clamps, these look like a good buy.

Seller has 5 Fluke i310s dual range 30 A / 300 A AC/DC clamps for £85 each (they are about £400 new)
I know nothing of the seller
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265634232197?

[BU508A]

Today arrival: three Clare Mercury wetted relays:

[Cerebus]

FedEx just brought a Mouser box with the Kria SOM which was on backorder.

Postal service dropped permanent "disabled" id for Hubby.

They also dropped off a speeding ticket. Bloody hell ....

Get yourself one of those after market Sat Navs with speed camera warnings built-in, I love mine, they also give advanced warnings of red light cameras, average speed zones and will actually calculate your average speed in real time in those sections.

Those devices are illegal here. If the police catches you with one, then you'll be fined.

Are you sure that you're not thinking of just RADAR speed trap detectors? Making illegal something that merely reminds you of the current speed limit would seem counter productive; the logical corollary to that would be to cut down all the speed limit signs because it's a bad thing for drivers to be informed of the current limit. However, I acknowledge that it's not beyond the stupidity of officialdom to do something that counterproductive.

Of course the best solution is just to pay enough attention that you don't get a speeding ticket in the first place. If you're doing that well enough then it's highly likely that you're driving at an appropriate speed for the conditions anyway. Back in the days when all police officers in the UK got specialist driver training* before they were allowed to drive police vehicles I used to know a police driving trainer. He always said that it was an order of magnitude more important to be doing an appropriate speed with regard to all the circumstances than it was to stick to the posted limit. He was not adverse to "making good progress" at a sane amount over the limit if it was safe to do so with regard to all the road conditions, equally he was quite happy to hand out a massive bollocking for driving within the speed limit but at a speed that was unsafe with regard to all the circumstances.

*Nowadays we have the concept of a "basic" police driver who gets no additional training and the results are quite evident if you observe the poor standard of driving displayed by the average police vehicle

[Saskia]

it was perfectly safe to drive as fast as I did, but I had a brain fart and thought that I was already out of town when actually I was not. And since this is known to the municipal waylaying people they placed their photoelectric gizmo there and took a photo of me at out of municipality speeds.
I did not get any points on my license though so at least that's that.

Having a speed trap warner in this country will get you prosecuted.
Not just fined, but prosecuted.

[Neper]

Are you sure that you're not thinking of just RADAR speed trap detectors?

Things aren't always clear, over here, and they're probably meant to be like this. Unlike the French, Germans usually tend to supppose that things are forbidden if they aren't expressly allowed. Still, to my knowledge, satnavs giving speed cam warnings are indeed illegal. OTOH, this doesn't keep our local FM stations from broadcasting warnings about mobile radars and encouraging listeners to phone in and report them.

Many years ago, I was sitting in a cab when the radio came on and the dispatcher warned the cabbies to drive carefully on the Rhine Bridge because the floor had been freshly waxed.  ;-)

[cyclin_al]

FedEx just brought a Mouser box with the Kria SOM which was on backorder.

Postal service dropped permanent "disabled" id for Hubby.

They also dropped off a speeding ticket. Bloody hell ....

Get yourself one of those after market Sat Navs with speed camera warnings built-in, I love mine, they also give advanced warnings of red light cameras, average speed zones and will actually calculate your average speed in real time in those sections.

Those devices are illegal here. If the police catches you with one, then you'll be fined.

SatNav devices are okay to use here in the GWN.  The best functioning one appears to be "Waze" which runs on the cell phone and does all the above functions.  There is a critical mass of users to have quality data in most geographic areas here.  The downside is that Waze is owned by Google and they are taking advantage of gathering data about your travels.

I was more thinking of a 5 kW Magnetron coupled with a radar detector and a directional antenna ...

All of those are illegal in the GWN.
It is interesting that the particular devices are illegal, but the functionality is not...

[mnementh]

Mnem, is this the kind of cheap Chineseum BMS 8S board that could be used in the Tek 422 scope & why only 7sections on the board? Would have been nicer to find something in the UK, but all those seem to be for larger solar/battery charging.

   

Original battery pack was 24V Ni-Cd D cells, I'm thinking of using LiFePo4 cells, I would need to modify the existing charger & low battery circuits on the scope.


David

It's an active balancing circuit; instead of bleeder resistors it shunts current from the highest cell to the lowest. It only needs active elements on B1-B7 to do so.

LiFePo4 tends to not like high current draw; you want to design around a 1-3C discharge rate. I see a 3A fuse in the battery circuit so pretty much any 18650-32650 Lixx cell of 3000mAH capacity or more should be a good match. Obviously you're going to need to make sure your BMS is either LiFePo4 firmware or programmable for LiFePo4. 20S Nixx application is a great candidate for a 8S LiFePo4 pack upgrade.

I suggest something like these, if you can get them where you are and have room for 2-7mm longer cells (32mm x 65-70mm), as they are sanely priced and have a nice 3C discharge rating, so you're definitely not going to be beating them very hard, and they should give you many many cycles. They are very close to the dimensions of a D-cell, which comes in at approx 34mm x 63mm:

https://batteryhookup.com/products/100-brand-new-lifep04-32650-3-2v-6000mah-cells

If your original pack was 10x2 configuration, that would be somewhere around 340mm x 68mm x64mm tall. Turned sideways in a 4x2 configuration, these would be ~270-280mm x32mm, so you could double-stack for 8S2P config at 270-280mm x64mm x 64mm "tall". This would still leave ~ 64mm x 64mm x 60-65mm deep at the end of the pack for the BMS board. Typical for these cells is 3.8-6AH capacity, so you'd be right around 7.6-12AH vs 8-10AH capacity for a full D-cell NiMH/NiCd battery.

Do you know what the actual float voltage and charge current of the existing charge circuitry is? From looking at the circuit... it appears ~27.1V less ~.6Vfd of that diode, so 26.5V / 8 =3.31V/cell... Hmmm. You really need to be charging at 3.4-3.5V/cell minimum, even if short-cycling to prolong battery life.

What's the Low-Batt light threshold? I see 11.5-35V operating voltage; if that reflects LVC (0.58V/Cell for the NiCd does seem a wee bit low) but the light comes on at a more conservative 1V/cell or 20V, you might actually be right in the ballpark at 2.5V/cell or 20V for the LiFePo4 pack. Then you'd just let the LVC in the BMS stop you from over-discharging the pack.

mnem
*juicy*

[mnementh]

it was perfectly safe to drive as fast as I did, but I had a brain fart and thought that I was already out of town when actually I was not. And since this is known to the municipal waylaying people they placed their photoelectric gizmo there and took a photo of me at out of municipality speeds.
I did not get any points on my license though so at least that's that.

Having a speed trap warner in this country will get you prosecuted.
Not just fined, but prosecuted.

Over here, there's still litigation going on about this... legally, they cannot file charges against a vehicle (as these automated speed traps do), they have to file charges against a person. So their end-run around these civil rights is to make it a civil infraction, not a criminal one. Standards of liability are different, as is the entire evidentiary process. They simply change the laws to make the owner of the vehicle liable for any wrongdoing committed with that vehicle.

That has many fleet operators up in arms; so there is considerable pressure from both big business and civil rights groups to change it back to forcing them to engage in proper legal due process again, or for big business, to bribe their way into laws that protect just them.

Of course, these municipalities (many of them small, so desperate for any source of funds) are seeing a huge cash influx from this new assault on the citizenry, so are just using that money to drag it out in court as long as they can... And on top of that, the whole "States' Rights" movement in local vs Federal regulation has made it so these cases have to be fought toe-to-toe, state-by-state and even in some cases municipality by municipality.

If your legal system over there is mired in this ridiculous bureaucratic red tape anywhere near the same as over here, we'll both be long ago pushing up daisies before there is any real resolution to this quasi-legal money grab on the part of small local government.

mnem
 

[AVGresponding]

How much HP 34401A 2W ohms digits usually differ from its outputting measurement voltage?

Now HP says 0,15013 kOhms and Fluke 8505A says 0,14909 V.
Leads are around 0,0001.

BTW,
Temperature dependency of one Volt Ref. AD584-M.
As in room temperature oven with a fish.

0,15 mV / 9,5 C sharp

I'll check when I get home from work. If I remember...

For a value of 100.0000 ohms read on the 34401A, I saw 100.7995mV on the Keithley 2015 (after a couple hours warm up, NPLC = 100, Vishay 100.00 ohms 0.01%).

As others have mentioned, it's a ratiometric measurement, calibrated to the individual range divider resistor current source output in the specific meter. Looks like mine has a slightly higher value to the resistor current source output.


It's been a long week, and I'm working the weekend again   

[mnementh]

My guess: 2 actual HAMs, the rest of the occupied tables operated by various different entities flogging the same exact household and makeup wares from the nearest Freight-reclamation liquidator.

And one crusty old bastard selling crusty-ass and broken hand-tools for more than they cost new; may or may not be the same person as one of the two actual HAMs.

mnem
 

Don't forget the crusty ham guy with the soggy cardboard box full of rusted PL-259 connectors and uselessly short pieces of old coax.

McBryce.

50/50 chance of it being either (or possibly both) of those two actual HAMs. 

mnem
*currently eating a breakfast of crusty frizzled eggs and HAM*

[mnementh]

FedEx just brought a Mouser box with the Kria SOM which was on backorder.

Postal service dropped permanent "disabled" id for Hubby.

They also dropped off a speeding ticket. Bloody hell ....

Get yourself one of those after market Sat Navs with speed camera warnings built-in, I love mine, they also give advanced warnings of red light cameras, average speed zones and will actually calculate your average speed in real time in those sections.

Those devices are illegal here. If the police catches you with one, then you'll be fined.

GPS with real-time speed limits & speed traps are illegal? These are standard features of just about any Nav app on a smartphone.

RADAR defectors/jammers, yeah... I guess those are still locality by locality as to whether legal or not. But I've never heard of such a thing for GPS. 

mnem

[Zucca]

You do realize that when they release the WP43S there will be some HW difference that makes it still better to buy it as a native WP43S rather than upgrading this one, right...?

Yes and no. Don't want to tell you the entire story, but I realized about the WP43S after the DM42 purchase.
No worries, this week end I will flash the WP43S on my DM42... then I will start to find out some overlay to stick on my DM42.

I can start to play with a WP43S this weekend..... happy like a baby in mom arms.

[mnementh]

      BWAHAHAHA!

mnem
A boy and his dog calculator... it's a beautiful thing... 

[THDplusN_bad]

BAM - BANG - BOOM!

Good Day to the gang,

it's not only the (in)famous RIFA filter caps that can cause us much grief - other RFI filters can emit that magic smoke, too :-(

Today, my GRUNDIG PN300 power supplies have both decided to let me down. If you are not familair with this model: These are quite nice, linear, triple output power supplies from the 90s, when GRUNDIG's history as a manufacturer of T&M equipment was already on its way to its bitter end. They feature two independent outputs for up to 30V and 2.3A and one fixed 5V/2A output. They can also be used as a simple curvetracer as they feature a GPIB/serial interface. Based on a toroidal transformer, they are quite reliable.

Well, quite...

I own two of these, both were maintained (minor repairs) and calibrated by myself.

The first unit had a stuck relay, so instead of 5V DC, it provided 25V DC for a brief moment.  Thankfully, I still had my index finger on the OUTPUT ON button and so I had managed to switched it off even before the current limiter cut it out.

Then the second unit came to replace it and after about 1.5 hrs of operation under very light load conditions, I heard the magic "ZZZZZZZZP - BANG!" noise we all love so much. 
I have acted immediately, identified what equipment had failed and down to the basement with it. Turned out that the RFI-filter has decided to throw in the towel and it began to spit its guts out. I had a quick clean up with window cleaner and a brush, blew the excess off with pressurized air and gave it a good rinse with IPA/alcohol. Some kitchen paper soaked up the liquid and I have repeated this twice after I had removed the internal assembly that holds the on/off switch and the line voltage switch. I have just ordered a replacement RF-filter that shall arrive early next week. Until then, this bugger dries on the heating.

BUGGERS!

Have a good weekend, all.

THDplusN_bad

[Kosmic]

More ESI SR1010 popped on Ebay recently at a really reasonable price and just couldn't resist.



No surprise Dale wirewound resistor this time. They are both in really good condition and were apparently owned by Tektronix.





I got the calibration sheet for both box but interestingly, the SR1010-100 came with 4, covering 1999 to 2013.



I'm starting to have quite a collection of SR1010. I can cover everything from 10\$\Omega\$ to 1M\$\Omega\$. Next step is finding or making the shorting bars to use them as transfer standard.

[tggzzz]

I've heard of barn finds (which probably aren't), but never found in a field, quite poor condition bunch of HP 174x & 172x scopes, thankfully too far away for me (in UK). 

At least one auction house stores equipment in a farm barn, the green building on the left. I've seen hessian sacks over the equipment to catch the condensation from the air.

Johns Radio in Bradford used to have a lot of "overflow" sitting in the yard in stillages under cheap polyester tarps. I visited once when the was a good 3 inches of snow on the ground and John (Townend) was madly searching the yard for a VNA he had sold bout could not find.....
They had an auction at one of his mills in late 90's that he tried to do himself. The catalog was late, no photos poor descriptions etc and them lots moved between viewing and the auction. Some stuff went dirt cheap. some of the 'scops I got for about £5 each were listed as "scope" but were the fairly modern Phillps models.
He complained bitterly later that the other dealers had conspired to keep prices low. It was nothing of the sort. He just tried to sell far too much at once with little publicity and a late poor catalog.
I stopped bidding when I judged my small van would not take any more 
I found one of his old ads from Wireless World....

I have at least three items in that list. I paid <10% of those prices, and they all work nicely

[Specmaster]

it was perfectly safe to drive as fast as I did, but I had a brain fart and thought that I was already out of town when actually I was not. And since this is known to the municipal waylaying people they placed their photoelectric gizmo there and took a photo of me at out of municipality speeds.
I did not get any points on my license though so at least that's that.

Having a speed trap warner in this country will get you prosecuted.
Not just fined, but prosecuted.

I think that Cerebus is correct in that only devices that will alert you to either radar or laser devices are illegal, as these will alert drivers to either an active laser mobile speed trap being used or a radar gun. These devices will also enable drivers to speed even where a Gatso camera is installed but not fitted with an actual camera as not all of these cameras, at least here in the UK have a camera fitted and hence do not set the warning device off.

Satnavs on the other hand are not fitted sensors that detect the presence of either laser or radar signal, instead they operate on pure GPS coordinates of known locations of where a camera or mobile speed traps are used and then alert you to the fact that you risk getting fined and thus slow you down.

The authorities here are happy for that type of device as it has the effect of slowing down drivers and thus improving safety, in fact they refer to such cameras as "safety cameras" rather than speed cameras, because it allows them to have fewer actual cameras and loads of camera locations that they move the cameras to ensure that drivers then treat each warning as a real threat and hence slow traffic down, and enhance safety.

I attach a screen print from my TomTom satnav program which clearly shows the countries which are in their speed camera locations database, which is updated as soon as they are made aware of new locations and the relative speed limit for that location. I don't think that they would be allowed to incorporate such information for countries that did not allow their use, do you 

[BU508A]

Are you sure that you're not thinking of just RADAR speed trap detectors? Making illegal something that merely reminds you of the current speed limit would seem counter productive; the logical corollary to that would be to cut down all the speed limit signs because it's a bad thing for drivers to be informed of the current limit. However, I acknowledge that it's not beyond the stupidity of officialdom to do something that counterproductive.

This is, what the ADAC is saying:

Blitzer-Apps und Radarwarner sind beliebt, denn sie schützen vor Bußgeldern. Aber egal, ob im Navi integriert oder auf dem Handy aktiviert: Radarwarner sind verboten. Wer sie verwendet, riskiert ein Bußgeld.

  -  Geschwindigkeitswarner dürfen nicht betriebsbereit mitgeführt werden

  -  Navis, die Blitzer anzeigen und Radarwarner-Apps dürfen nicht verwendet werden

  -  Es gibt keine einheitliche Regelung in Europa

Translation via DeepL:
Speed camera apps and radar detectors are popular because they protect you from fines. But regardless of whether they are integrated into your navigation system or activated on your mobile phone: Radar detectors are prohibited. Anyone who uses them risks a fine.

  - Speed camera detectors must not be carried in an operational state

  - Navis that display speed cameras and speed camera apps must not be used.

  - There is no uniform regulation in Europe

Source: https://www.adac.de/verkehr/recht/verkehrsvorschriften-deutschland/radarwarner/

[TERRA Operative]

Trying to update the software in my AWG510, and can't find the button in the menu to start the update process...

Then I notice this in the readme......

If you have the AWG500 series of Program Version:1.x and hope
for the system software upgrade,please contact your local
Tektronix representative and request assistance.

I have version 1.6B.... Shit.    

I sent off a message to Tek support, but I feel like I'll get the usual 'This product is no longer supported' stonewall from them.

[PA0PBZ]

This is, what the ADAC is saying:

It looks like the GPS based warning is not allowed in Germany, France, Switzerland and Slovakia, in the rest of the EU countries it is allowed but active detectors are not allowed anywhere.