Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[factory]

Very nice find  , I'm just happy to have found one over here, will probably never see another.

The serial number plate is inside in my 524B, if you remove the plug-in, it should be on the right (if it's the same as mine).


Nice to see you have an extra gate time multiplier option fitted to your 524B, never seen that before, then again these counters aren't exactly common.

Did they have any more plug-ins for them? I've only got the two frequency converters (525A & 525B) & the 540B transfer oscillator to use with one of then, still looking for some of the other plug-ins.

Looking forward to more on the early DVM too. 

David

I went down and took a look - the 524C is a post 1961 engineering rev, more exact date TBD once I open it up.


The 524B has a pre-1960 serial number.  I'm not sure if they transitioned everything to the 1960-style multipart S/N on everything in 1960, but going on the (possibly mistaken) impression that they did, it's 50s vintage.  Again, I'll be able to tell more once I open it up and see some component date codes.  I also think they likely had stopped making the 524B by 1960 as it only appears as an afterthought in a tiny blurb at the bottom of the last 524 page in the 1959 catalog.


-Pat

My 524B is slightly newer (sn 4242, US made), looking through my pictures for date codes it probably dates from around 1959, though I did find this replacement capacitor from 1962, labelled by the HP Bedford England factory. According to the history I've read, they supposedly built them over here too.




P.S. Did bd139 not say how great British plugs are, recently. 


David

[Vince]

Anyway... I meant to post about this puppy below... just popped up on Leboncoin.

https://www.leboncoin.fr/collection/2178065855.htm

One of those once in a lifetime opportunities, good luck finding another one of those, I guess.

It's a lovely, pristine, compact, super cute Nixie DMM !
Made by Schneider, model MN124.

Do eeeeeeet!

Can"t hear you, say again please ??

OK that sounded like some kind of encouragement I guess... 


Will message the guy and try to convince him to do what he explicitly stated he does not want to do... will probably get called names " CAN'T YOU FUCKING READ OR WHAT? RETARD !!! "

... but it's worth the risk 

OK I sent the guy a message via the website... website reports that the guy did read my message.. but he did not reply to me 

Oh well, was worth a try for sure !

At least he was nice enough to refrain from replying just to insult me....

[bd139]

P.S. Did bd139 not say how great British plugs are, recently. 


David

Hahaha yeah I've had a couple like that as well. Some of the older plastics degrade terribly!

[Vince]

Pfff.... Just as I hit "reply" to open a composing window, I didn't even get the time to write the first word that... POWER OUTAGE !   

Few days ago I finally installed an old UPS that has been around to check how it is.

Few hours later we had a power cut of few seconds, UPS worked.
I've done few lotteries.

Oh, that reminds that I have been given an old UPS !!!

Decent brand, Merlin Gérin. model " Pulsar S4 ".

Well I say old because although there is no date code that I can see at the back, the data / comms connector is not USB but good old DB9 so RS232 I imagine (though could be anything I guess, maybe 4-20mA  industrial interface... ).

Says 250W and 400VA.

Enclosure has been hacked to accomodate a standard lead acid 12Ah battery.

I wonder if that thing still works.... bit afraid to power it up, don't want the thing to blow up in my face...

[mnementh]

Good lord... I just run them with no cover if I wanna use a rando SLA... 

mnem

[Vince]

My honour being at stake here... just in case my post was not clear,  it was obviously not me hacking the enclosure, UPS was given to me like this... as I said I have never touched this thing, don't even know if it even works...

[Specmaster]

P.S. Did bd139 not say how great British plugs are, recently. 


David

Hahaha yeah I've had a couple like that as well. Some of the older plastics degrade terribly!

Yeah, that was one of the old rubber plugs, and we all know that rubber goes funny after a few years and as that plug does have sleeved live and neutral pins, it must be pre-1984, so it is at least 38 years old so its condition is no surprise to me.

[Specmaster]

My honour being at stake here... just in case my post was not clear,  it was obviously not me hacking the enclosure, UPS was given to me like this... as I said I have never touched this thing, don't even know if it even works...

One way to find out, try it and see, whats the worst that can happen?

[ch_scr]

My honour being at stake here... just in case my post was not clear,  it was obviously not me hacking the enclosure, UPS was given to me like this... as I said I have never touched this thing, don't even know if it even works...

One way to find out, try it and see, whats the worst that can happen?

Small flames and big stench, tried that one before. Lots of current even in "small" lead batteries... Also, that lead-acid battery is most certainly dead.

[Specmaster]

My honour being at stake here... just in case my post was not clear,  it was obviously not me hacking the enclosure, UPS was given to me like this... as I said I have never touched this thing, don't even know if it even works...

One way to find out, try it and see, whats the worst that can happen?

Small flames and big stench, tried that one before. Lots of current even in "small" lead batteries... Also, that lead-acid battery is most certainly dead.

Thats why you take precautions, dim bulb, fuses in the battery lead and off load test to see if it is charging and switching over or not.

[mansaxel]

Manuals for uncommon Solartron TE are quite hard to find, much like some others British TE manufacturers. There is however someone over on the UK vintage radio forum, that might have the LM1604 (without AC option) manual, if that helps.
https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showpost.php?p=920523&postcount=11

I've only got manuals for the 1420 & 1440, I do have a few catalogs & brochures dating from the 1980s & all the way back to the early 1960s, but there is a noticeable gap in these, I haven't got any that cover the 1619/1620 & A2xx series DVMs.

David

Thanks. I'll dig around.

[AVGresponding]

Pfff.... Just as I hit "reply" to open a composing window, I didn't even get the time to write the first word that... POWER OUTAGE !   

Few days ago I finally installed an old UPS that has been around to check how it is.

Few hours later we had a power cut of few seconds, UPS worked.
I've done few lotteries.

Oh, that reminds that I have been given an old UPS !!!

Decent brand, Merlin Gérin. model " Pulsar S4 ".

Well I say old because although there is no date code that I can see at the back, the data / comms connector is not USB but good old DB9 so RS232 I imagine (though could be anything I guess, maybe 4-20mA  industrial interface... ).

Says 250W and 400VA.

Enclosure has been hacked to accomodate a standard lead acid 12Ah battery.

I wonder if that thing still works.... bit afraid to power it up, don't want the thing to blow up in my face...

It's RS232, though if it's a rebadged APC it might have non-standard pinout...

[mnementh]

My honour being at stake here... just in case my post was not clear,  it was obviously not me hacking the enclosure, UPS was given to me like this... as I said I have never touched this thing, don't even know if it even works...

One way to find out, try it and see, whats the worst that can happen?

Small flames and big stench, tried that one before. Lots of current even in "small" lead batteries... Also, that lead-acid battery is most certainly dead.

Thats why you take precautions, dim bulb, fuses in the battery lead and off load test to see if it is charging and switching over or not.

Dim bulb doesn't work so well on a UPS for reasons which should be obvious, at least in this space with this crowd. 

Take it outside, unplug the battery and measure voltage on battery. Plug UPS in with no battery and if it blinks and screams at you (you may need to press the power button) , most likely mostly still working. Check voltage coming out of battery pigtails; it should start at 2-6 volts and ramp up a bit before cutting out. Let it scream for a hour or 3 to be reasonably sure not just made of fire or capacitor smoke.

If battery voltage above 10-11V, plug it in and it should start to charge. If not, try to charge battery manually with lab PSU.

mnem
 

[tautech]

@ Vince, what mnem said ! ^^

[Vince]

Thank you for your advice, which I am reading only AFTER the fact, because I had already moved my butt towards the bench to fiddle with this thing... but I more or less did what you suggested....


First I popped the cover, disconnected the battery terminals (couldn't remove the battery itself though, it's stuck in there  ) and measured voltage. 1.0V, not a lot  ! 

So was probably dead. I tried recharging it with the lab supply you never know, but it failed to take any current no matter what voltage I applied... went up to 30Volts the max the supply will do, still not a single electron willing to flow into that battery.

So the battery is dead, open circuit.

So instead I powered the inverter from the lab supply rather than from the battery, limiting the current and increasing voltage slowly.... but nothing happens.
Pressing the button on the front panel doesn't help, no LED activity, and the board just doesn't draw any current at all, it's dead as a dodo.
Of course I checked on the output mains socket, zero volts coming out either.

So.... dead battery and dead inverter board, not a good start ! 

So did some disassembling, pulling wires connectors and unscrewing lugs... so I could flip the board to have a close look at the component side.

Tried to take a half decent pic of the board for your immense pleasure. I know squat about inverters and of course there won't be any schematic.

I looked around... can't see any obvious sign of component failure or over heating...
All I can see if that the buzzer is damaged/missing : its cover/top part came off and inside was... nothing. The piezo bit is not in there anymore... I don't know, guy who hacked that thing probably damaged it in the process 

I can't see any CPU on the board. It looks 100% discrete through-hole design with a bunch of jelly bean DIP ICs as you can see. 9 of them.

- 4001 (NOR gates)
- 4011 (NAND gates)
- 4013 (x2)  dual flip-flop
- 4066 (quad analog switches)
- LM339 (x2) comparators
- Good old LM317 !
- UC3524AN (PWM controller)

As for transistors, we have 5 of them, all 50N05.... 50 Amps 0.022 ohm N-MOSFETs ! Boy at the least I can salvage those !!!
4 come in TO220 packages, organized as two pairs, each pair being mounted on its separate heat sink.
Then the fifth comes in a very large plastic package and is a lone wolf, mounted on a different heat sink, same heat sink as the LM317.

-  A 40A Fuse, in an automotive style package ?! 
- x3 relays
- a small transformer, I guess to power the board and recharge the battery.
- a big ass transformer mounted to the chassis which obviously is driven by the inverter and powers the output mains sockets.


So it doesn't look like rocket science ? Maybe I could spend a couple hours probing around, maybe I can fix it... and even if I can't it's still fun trying to anyway...
Since it's a " No Power " issue at first glance, with some luck it's fairly simple...

[vk6zgo]

Got the motivation to have a look at the ADVANCE J2E oscillator I have that's taken a step backwards - it has no output at all now.  However, since it's a valve based unit (and I've not worked on valve gear for quite some time) I wanted to get a schematic with at least some voltages on it.  All I've found so far is the same scanned images of the manual, presented in different wrapping.  It has a component list and a schematic ... without a single voltage or waveform.  Will be doing a close visual inspection before powering up.

What I did come across, however, was this little gem: eBay auction: #154458177121


Just .... wow.

This guy had the same problem:-
http://www.portabletubes.co.uk/testing/advue2e.htm

[vk6zgo]

Got the motivation to have a look at the ADVANCE J2E oscillator I have that's taken a step backwards - it has no output at all now.  However, since it's a valve based unit (and I've not worked on valve gear for quite some time) I wanted to get a schematic with at least some voltages on it.  All I've found so far is the same scanned images of the manual, presented in different wrapping.  It has a component list and a schematic ... without a single voltage or waveform.  Will be doing a close visual inspection before powering up.

What I did come across, however, was this little gem: eBay auction: #154458177121


Just .... wow.

That sadly seems to be the modern trend to produce schematics with zero voltages other than the main rails. It sort of gives the impression that they don't want people to try and repair items, but to throw them away and buy new, but to satisfy their critics, produced the schematics anyway but some vital information missing making life a little harder than it needed to be 

Advance J2Es are hardly "modern".
I think in their case it was just plain laziness, combined with parsimony.
There were a number of firms like that back in the day------ sadly, many were in the UK.

[Zucca]

checking the specs

The current for the 5 A input element can be set as low as 10 mA for measuring extremely small currents in energy-saving equipment.

Wow

Even more impressive if you know they've done this (and up to 1MHz bandwith with still low DC offset drift) at 1mV across the shunt resistor (100mOhm for the 5A element, 1mOhm for the 50A element) - the lowest range (1A) on the 50A input is the same voltage (1mV). If you do some comparisons and calculations, you'll note there are less ranges available for the 50A element, this a concession to limited thermal dissipation capabilities of the shunts.

@capt bullshot
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/buysellwanted/fs-(eu)-yokogawa-wt1600-power-meter-3-channels-calibrated-till-2024/

1000€ too much?
sooooo tempting

[mnementh]

My honour being at stake here... just in case my post was not clear,  it was obviously not me hacking the enclosure, UPS was given to me like this... as I said I have never touched this thing, don't even know if it even works...

LOL... no, I assumed it was the previous owner with years of rust around the hackity-hole.

Looks like somebody ripped the piezo speaker apart to make it stop screaming; no idea how long they ran it with a dead battery. Not at all promising. RS-232 and no network... thing is probably decades old.

No evidence of anything running... probably either something very simple/stoopit like a startup resistor or open cap, or something terminal and BER-worthy. I'd try sticking some kind of speaker across those spring terminals, preferably piezo. See if it at least chirps when you turn the power on and press the TEST button.

EDIT: It's not clear from your post... you have tried plugging it into AC power, right? These things will not always power up at all just from DC; they are expecting to be deployed from a "AC ON" condition, then failover to battery. You will not likely harm anything powering up with no battery in it for a short time.

Good hunting!

mnem
 

[Vince]

Oh yes !!!

You were right the bloody thing somehow needed mains power to get going again, some state machine needed to be reset or something !

Works now !  :-D

I found a 12V battery....  an old car battery I bought 3 or 4 years ago I think. Somehow didn't end up in the car, can't remember why... so from new it sat unused for all these years under the kitchen table.
I remember briefly using it on the bench  nearly 2 years ago now, to power up / test a used electronic ballast module I bought for the HID lights on my car. So I powered the ballast / light for a few seconds, saw that it was working fine, called it a day and put the battery again back to sleep ! Now digging it out again and go figure it's still not dead, measured 12.05 Volts still ! So maybe not dead...tried putting some juice in it with the lab supply.... no problem ! Started modestly at 1A to wake up the battery slowly.. didn't want it to blow a head gasket or something !
15 minutes like that, was going well it looked like.. so I increased the current to 2.85A, the max the power supply will do. Battery was taking it no problems... left it like that for 30 minutes.

Good enough for a quick test of the inverter I thought !

So I plugged it to the inverter... no joy.

Plugged the mains cable as you suggested... ohhhhh, relays clicking briefly !  Turn the (soft) power switch at the back to 'ON'... some more action happening ! 

The main / big transformer now is buzzing loudly and the battery LED at the front panel lights up orange. That lasted for a few seconds then the transformer stopped buzzing, it all became quiet, and the orange LED turned off, and instead the mains status LED lit green, looking good I thought !

So I measured the mains at the OUTlets and.... yeah 250Volts present !!! 

Then I unplugged the mains cable / Input, and bingo, transformer starts buzzing again, inverter working then, and I STILL have 250V at the outputs !

IT WOOOORKS !!! 

Cool, I have meself a nice little industrial Merlin-Gerin inverter ! 

250W / 400VA it says.... might be enough to power my computer, it's not a power house (purposefully so, did want it to be quiet and not draw too much power). And if not.... will still be useful to power other stuff I am sure.

Wow that's cool, some more useful gear in the house !

[tautech]

Oh yes !!!

You were right the bloody thing somehow needed mains power to get going again, some state machine needed to be reset or something !

Works now !  :-D

finally Vince proceeded with the obvious. 

Yep, they need mains power first then for it to fail before they will automatically do the battery inverter changeover thing for fairly obvious safety reasons. 

[mansaxel]

Oh yes !!!

You were right the bloody thing somehow needed mains power to get going again, some state machine needed to be reset or something !

Works now !  :-D

It's bigger brothers, say those that come in "one full rack cabinet" sizes, not counting batteries (they're in another room, often 155AH packs, several strings in parallel) and have things like Modbus for syncing and paralleling several cabinets together, also want to start on mains.

This is because they lock on to the waveform, rectify it, feed it to the batteries (they usually run the battery banks around 410-420V) and then make new nice 3x 400VAC again. All the time. And that waveform is phase-locked to the input. This is necessary because they have internal bypass using SSR's that allow for seamless transition between mains and battery operation when the UPS needs to go off-line. In normal working, it as noted runs on-line.

This is in contrast to simple UPSes (roughly everything that one can lift oneself); who count on detecting mains loss and starting the rectifier, clicking a relay over and keeping going.

[capt bullshot]

@capt bullshot
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/buysellwanted/fs-(eu)-yokogawa-wt1600-power-meter-3-channels-calibrated-till-2024/

1000€ too much?
sooooo tempting

Do you want it?
Can you afford it?
Are you happy with the price tag?

My answers would be: Yes, yes, no.

Won't tell how much I paid for my 6ch WT1600 (not the one from Ice-Tea) - but it was way less.
There's a lot of tempting things out there, but sometimes the price tag has to be low enough, too.

[capt bullshot]

Oh yes !!!

You were right the bloody thing somehow needed mains power to get going again, some state machine needed to be reset or something !

Works now !  :-D

Some of the simple offline UPS's can start without mains from battery: The APC 1kVA one that decays somewhere in my parents house can be started from battery only by a special push release push again sequence with the power button.
The few seconds transformer buzzing is the battery test, the UPS runs the inverter for a short time to load test the battery.

Otherwise, I wouldn't call this UPS "industrial", it's the typical low cost end user variant - they all look quite similar from inside.

[BU508A]

Won't tell how much I paid for my 6ch WT1600 (not the one from Ice-Tea) - but it was way less.

Ah, so it was you who'd bought it from ebay Kleinanzeigen? I had it on my watchlist for a while and was wondering, why nobody would buying it.
I didn't have a use case for it, otherwise I would have bought it right away. 
Glad, that it found its way to you.