Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[BU508A]

There was a FSEM30 in the ebay classifieds in Germany for 1900 Euro. Pickup only in Berlin.

https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/rohde-schwarz-spectrum-analyzer-fsem30/2162852827-168-3338

[grizewald]

Very nice. The king of spectrum analysers, with a price fit for a king too!

[Zenith]

Very nice. The king of spectrum analysers, with a price fit for a king too!

If you have that high an opinion of it, and you have a serious use for it, or you'd get that much pleasure from owning it, the 1900 Euro price maybe not that bad - unless parting with the money would stop you doing something else you ought to do or wanted to do.

Apart from the fact it's for personal collection from Berlin, it's not a thing I'd dream of buying, at least not for anything near that price, which I assume is about what it's worth.

 

[Vince]

Wondering if anyone hit this problem... am currently shopping for a CF card to IDE adapter. Cheapest ones are these, photo below.

I searched on Ebay and sorted by cheapest " PRICE + SHIPPING "

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=cf+ide+40pin&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&LH_PrefLoc=2&_sop=15&rt=nc&_pgn=1

The first three sellers in the list,  charge only 1 USD for shipping from china direct. So I go to buy that, then once in the cart, go figure the 1 USD shipping magically turned into THREE bucks !!! 
Tried all 3 sellers, same result for all of them.

Has anyone experienced that before ? Anything one can do to rectify the situation... like, is it the seller screwing things up, or Ebay themselves ? Any luck getting that problem sorted so you can get the advertised shipping ?

I sure will be more careful from now on ! 

So I kept going in the list of results, and when I got to that seller that charges 2 USD for shipping....

https://www.ebay.com/itm/112934293618?hash=item1a4b689072

...in the cart I ACTUALLY got charged 2 bucks, not 3 or 5 or god knows what.
So in the end the advertised shipping is twice that of the others... but will actually end up being cheaper in practice, weird... so I think I will order that one.

I can't figure out why they put a freaking FEMALE IDE connector when the thing is supposed to replace a hard drive that obviously has a MALE connector 
They thought one would plug them straight to the motherboard or what ?!

They also have a FLOPPY power connector, again how many old 3.5" IDE hard drives have a floppy power connector ? Not the one I saw I the past 30 years at least.
I understand that a floopy connector is enough to power this adpater, but it's an ADAPTER... it's supposed to make it easy for your to ADAPT to the old hard drive you are replacing, no ? 
So it's supposed to sport the same connectors...

So now I probably do not have a spare floppy power connector on this machine, so will need to bodge something, more work and ugliness. Have a few old salvaged PC pwoer supplies so I can pinch an FDD connector from those, but then how do I plug it to the old female power connector in the machine ? Would need a male power connector... for that I would need to destroy some old peripheral, not sure I have that. So would need to cut the old HDD connector and solder the FDD one instead. How "cool"....

Yes, I bet there are adapters for sale somewhere... more money and yet more weeks to wait for it to arrive.... am on a budget so will make it work with what I have here, or nothing.

As for the female 40 pin IDE connector, that's easier to fix with some male to male 0.1" strips... should do it I guess. I have some here so no worries.

So that's a lot of hacking and messing around to get this thing to work when it should have come with the proper connectors to begin with ! 

But.... only 4 bucks shipped, so I guess you get what you pay for....

Still, can't wait to receive it and start playing with it....

I saw another adapter that you can mount on an expansion slot bracket, which looks pretty neat. Have plenty of empty slots so that could do it.
Would make for a neater install, the adapter would not be flapping in the breeze inside the computer, and the drive would also be accessible from the outside of the case which is practical.
Also, it has the proper MALE IDE connector this time. However it still has the floppy power connector, which is the main problem.to me, so that would still need to be sorted.

Price is same as the crappier one above,... SHIPPED that is. Unit itself is twice the price, but shipping is free (ACTUALLY free, I checked in the cart).
So really I would go for that one, but the problem is..... regardless of vendor, the shipping delays are intolerable. The crappy one is 2 to 3 weeks, I can about live with that, but the better one is... septembre to octobre... basically by the time you receive it you already forgot you had ordered it in the first place ! 

So... think I will gor the crappy one, just so I can get in a reasonable time frame and get this GPIB project moving along.

[bd139]

This is manipulating the pricing ranking so when people sort cheapest first they com up first and it's not unusual. There is a similar problem with products with options being sold where the primary item you want is say £10 and a USB cable only is available as an option for £1 and it'll sort it by the "from" price.

aka ebay sucks and they don't give a shit about that.

[mnementh]

WOndering if anyone hit thisproblem... am currently shopping for a CF card to IDE adapter. Cheapest ones are these, photo below.

I searched on EBay and sorted bty cheapest " PRICE + SHIPPING "

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=cf+ide+40pin&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&LH_PrefLoc=2&_sop=15&rt=nc&_pgn=1

The first three sellers in the list,  charge only 1 USD for shipping from china direct. So I go to buy that, then once in the cart, go figure the 1 USD shipping magically turned into THREE bucks !!! 
Tried all 3 sellers, same result for all of them.

Has anyone experienced that before ? Anything one can do to rectify the situation... like, is it the seller screwing things up, or Ebay themselves ? Any luck getting that problem sorted so you can get the advertised shipping ?

I sure will be more careful from now on ! 

So I kept going in the list of results, and when I got to the seller that charges 2 USD for shipping....

https://www.ebay.com/itm/112934293618?hash=item1a4b689072

...in the cart I ACTUALLY got charged 2 bucks, not 3 or 5 or god knows what.
So in the end the advertised shipping is twice that of the others... but will actually end up being cheaper in practice, weird... so I think I will order that one.

I can't figure out why they put a freaking FEMALE IDE connector when the thing is supposed to replace a hard drive that obviously has a MALE connector 
They though one would plug them straight to the motherboard or what ?!  

They're made this way to go into older laptops, almost all of which used a caddy with a proprietary connector to IDE header on them.

Strike that... this one has a standard 40-pin IDE header on it, not the 44-pin used on laptops to provide power. I should've looked closer at the pic.  It probably is intended to plug directly into a MB or, as they were popular back in the day, a 3.5" HDD caddy.

The shipping cost difference is probably because your currency setting is USD, so shipping is automatically shown calculated to the US for x amount; it doesn't correct that until you put it in your cart which has your location in France. Alternately, many China Direct vendors do not combine shipping. Alternately, if you look into the body, many vendors apply a "handling" surcharge on top of advertised shipping to cover packing labor and packing materials. eBay explicitly permits this, but that should be visible somewhere in the listing.

mnem
 

[syau]

WOndering if anyone hit thisproblem... am currently shopping for a CF card to IDE adapter. Cheapest ones are these, photo below.

I searched on EBay and sorted bty cheapest " PRICE + SHIPPING "

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=cf+ide+40pin&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&LH_PrefLoc=2&_sop=15&rt=nc&_pgn=1

The first three sellers in the list,  charge only 1 USD for shipping from china direct. So I go to buy that, then once in the cart, go figure the 1 USD shipping magically turned into THREE bucks !!! 
Tried all 3 sellers, same result for all of them.

Has anyone experienced that before ? Anything one can do to rectify the situation... like, is it the seller screwing things up, or Ebay themselves ? Any luck getting that problem sorted so you can get the advertised shipping ?

I sure will be more careful from now on ! 

So I kept going in the list of results, and when I got to the seller that charges 2 USD for shipping....

https://www.ebay.com/itm/112934293618?hash=item1a4b689072

...in the cart I ACTUALLY got charged 2 bucks, not 3 or 5 or god knows what.
So in the end the advertised shipping is twice that of the others... but will actually end up being cheaper in practice, weird... so I think I will order that one.

I can't figure out why they put a freaking FEMALE IDE connector when the thing is supposed to replace a hard drive that obviously has a MALE connector 
They though one would plug them straight to the motherboard or what ?!

Why bother with the cable if you can connect to the MB directly 
Same as those DiskonChip which used a lot  in the industry controllers.

[mnementh]

This is manipulating the pricing ranking so when people sort cheapest first they com up first and it's not unusual. There is a similar problem with products with options being sold where the primary item you want is say £10 and a USB cable only is available as an option for £1 and it'll sort it by the "from" price.

aka ebay sucks and they don't give a shit about that.

Yeah, the really egregious price-scamming is where they'll list multiple similar items folks are actually interested in, then add something worthless like a 0.29 spudger for $1.00 (I've even seen a single guitar pick - no lie) to get into the lowest pricing bracket.

You often have to wade through hundreds of such  listings to get to the first that is listed at an actual price you can buy the thing; I use my personal content filter there just like I do here.

If it's really bad, I'll set the minimum price range to like $10 less than my maximum price, then sort in descending order going down to the cheapest real, non- price. Then I look for the usual fraud tipoffs of low/poor feedback, no or very few very recent feedbacks for large number of sales, lots of "never got it" feedback, etc. from those results.

mnem
only fleas of qwalitee sold here!

[Vince]

[...]
I can't figure out why they put a freaking FEMALE IDE connector when the thing is supposed to replace a hard drive that obviously has a MALE connector 
They though one would plug them straight to the motherboard or what ?!  

They're made this way to go into older laptops, almost all of which used a caddy with a proprietary connector to IDE header on them.

mnem
 

Oh, thanks, makes sense now !   

That explains also the form factor, very narrow so it can slide into the laptop slot.

[Zoli]

WOndering if anyone hit thisproblem... am currently shopping for a CF card to IDE adapter. Cheapest ones are these, photo below.

I searched on EBay and sorted bty cheapest " PRICE + SHIPPING "

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=cf+ide+40pin&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&LH_PrefLoc=2&_sop=15&rt=nc&_pgn=1

The first three sellers in the list,  charge only 1 USD for shipping from china direct. So I go to buy that, then once in the cart, go figure the 1 USD shipping magically turned into THREE bucks !!! 
Tried all 3 sellers, same result for all of them.

Has anyone experienced that before ? Anything one can do to rectify the situation... like, is it the seller screwing things up, or Ebay themselves ? Any luck getting that problem sorted so you can get the advertised shipping ?

I sure will be more careful from now on ! 

So I kept going in the list of results, and when I got to the seller that charges 2 USD for shipping....

https://www.ebay.com/itm/112934293618?hash=item1a4b689072

...in the cart I ACTUALLY got charged 2 bucks, not 3 or 5 or god knows what.
So in the end the advertised shipping is twice that of the others... but will actually end up being cheaper in practice, weird... so I think I will order that one.

I can't figure out why they put a freaking FEMALE IDE connector when the thing is supposed to replace a hard drive that obviously has a MALE connector 
They though one would plug them straight to the motherboard or what ?!

In your case the motherboard type is preferable, since it secures without any other problem; and if is on common cable with the CD, you can leave the CD alone on the cable.
One more thing to check: do you have extra floppy power  connector available? If not, you need ad adapter something like: https://www.ebay.com/itm/384981626421

[pcprogrammer]

This is manipulating the pricing ranking so when people sort cheapest first they com up first and it's not unusual. There is a similar problem with products with options being sold where the primary item you want is say £10 and a USB cable only is available as an option for £1 and it'll sort it by the "from" price.

aka ebay sucks and they don't give a shit about that.

And on Aliexpress it is the same kind of shit. Also with their emailing. You see something with an interesting price in the mail, you click on it and the actual price is higher

[bd139]

Trick is to not buy that shit. Not giving asshats money.

[pcprogrammer]

Trick is to not buy that shit. Not giving asshats money.

But it is an addiction Lately not that much though. Got enough stuff around to keep me busy for a while.

[mnementh]

[...]
I can't figure out why they put a freaking FEMALE IDE connector when the thing is supposed to replace a hard drive that obviously has a MALE connector 
They though one would plug them straight to the motherboard or what ?!  

They're made this way to go into older laptops, almost all of which used a caddy with a proprietary connector to IDE header on them.

mnem
 

Oh, thanks, makes sense now !   

That explains also the form factor, very narrow so it can slide into the laptop slot.

Sorry - Strike that... this one has a standard 40-pin IDE header on it, not the 44-pin 2mm pitch IDC header used on laptops to provide power. I should've looked closer at the pic. Or actually looked at the listing. It probably is intended to plug directly into a MB or, as they were popular back in the day, a surplus 3.5" HDD caddy or external enclosure.

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

Wondering if anyone hit this problem... am currently shopping for a CF card to IDE adapter. Cheapest ones are these, photo below.

I searched on Ebay and sorted by cheapest " PRICE + SHIPPING "

[url]https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=cf+ide+40pin&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&LH_PrefLoc=2&_sop=15&rt=nc&_pgn=1[/url]

The first three sellers in the list,  charge only 1 USD for shipping from china direct. So I go to buy that, then once in the cart, go figure the 1 USD shipping magically turned into THREE bucks !!! 
Tried all 3 sellers, same result for all of them.

Has anyone experienced that before ? Anything one can do to rectify the situation... like, is it the seller screwing things up, or Ebay themselves ? Any luck getting that problem sorted so you can get the advertised shipping ?

I sure will be more careful from now on ! 

So I kept going in the list of results, and when I got to that seller that charges 2 USD for shipping....

[url]https://www.ebay.com/itm/112934293618?hash=item1a4b689072[/url]

...in the cart I ACTUALLY got charged 2 bucks, not 3 or 5 or god knows what.
So in the end the advertised shipping is twice that of the others... but will actually end up being cheaper in practice, weird... so I think I will order that one.

I can't figure out why they put a freaking FEMALE IDE connector when the thing is supposed to replace a hard drive that obviously has a MALE connector 
They thought one would plug them straight to the motherboard or what ?!

They also have a FLOPPY power connector, again how many old 3.5" IDE hard drives have a floppy power connector ? Not the one I saw I the past 30 years at least.
I understand that a floopy connector is enough to power this adpater, but it's an ADAPTER... it's supposed to make it easy for your to ADAPT to the old hard drive you are replacing, no ? 
So it's supposed to sport the same connectors...

So now I probably do not have a spare floppy power connector on this machine, so will need to bodge something, more work and ugliness. Have a few old salvaged PC pwoer supplies so I can pinch an FDD connector from those, but then how do I plug it to the old female power connector in the machine ? Would need a male power connector... for that I would need to destroy some old peripheral, not sure I have that. So would need to cut the old HDD connector and solder the FDD one instead. How "cool"....

Yes, I bet there are adapters for sale somewhere... more money and yet more weeks to wait for it to arrive.... am on a budget so will make it work with what I have here, or nothing.

As for the female 40 pin IDE connector, that's easier to fix with some male to male 0.1" strips... should do it I guess. I have some here so no worries.

So that's a lot of hacking and messing around to get this thing to work when it should have come with the proper connectors to begin with ! 

But.... only 4 bucks shipped, so I guess you get what you pay for....

Still, can't wait to receive it and start playing with it....

I saw another adapter that you can mount on an expansion slot bracket, which looks pretty neat. Have plenty of empty slots so that could do it.
Would make for a neater install, the adapter would not be flapping in the breeze inside the computer, and the drive would also be accessible from the outside of the case which is practical.
Also, it has the proper MALE IDE connector this time. However it still has the floppy power connector, which is the main problem.to me, so that would still need to be sorted.

Price is same as the crappier one above,... SHIPPED that is. Unit itself is twice the price, but shipping is free (ACTUALLY free, I checked in the cart).
So really I would go for that one, but the problem is..... regardless of vendor, the shipping delays are intolerable. The crappy one is 2 to 3 weeks, I can about live with that, but the better one is... septembre to octobre... basically by the time you receive it you already forgot you had ordered it in the first place ! 

So... think I will gor the crappy one, just so I can get in a reasonable time frame and get this GPIB project moving along.

Hmm, not sure what is happening here, I tried the first one, $1 shipping, added it to my cart, go to cart, and it shows $1 shipping and $0.65 VAT.

[tggzzz]

Yeah, the really egregious price-scamming is where they'll list multiple similar items folks are actually interested in, then add something worthless like a 0.29 spudger for $1.00 (I've even seen a single guitar pick - no lie) to get into the lowest pricing bracket.

If I saw that I'd raise a complaint w.r.t. "listing practices".

That's less easy to do when all the similar (but cheaper) options are out of stock.

[mnementh]

Yeah... that's ridiculous for the most egregious of these, which are for very popular items like a USB doodad or some kind of charger, and there are literally hundreds exactly the same. Even I'm not that much of a loon. 

mnem

I am Diogenes.

[bd139]

Yeah, the really egregious price-scamming is where they'll list multiple similar items folks are actually interested in, then add something worthless like a 0.29 spudger for $1.00 (I've even seen a single guitar pick - no lie) to get into the lowest pricing bracket.

If I saw that I'd raise a complaint w.r.t. "listing practices".

That's less easy to do when all the similar (but cheaper) options are out of stock.

EBay don’t care. They make money either way.

[Brumby]

I've walked away from epay on more than one occasion when that crap shows up.  I'm not into wasting my time trying to wade through that excrement.

I have much more palatable means of wasting time... 

[Specmaster]

Guys double-check your systems, it is working perfectly on mine, I tried all of those and the delivery charge was the same as on the listing 

[mnementh]

Yeah, the listing he bought from rings up as +$3.60 SpeedPak shipping to me; three others all ring up with the free shipping as advertised.

No doubt poor Vince is getting slammed with a little froggy asshole tax because French Bureaucracy and customs and somebody hates paperwork or some similar .

mnem
 

[Brumby]

I get unit price: US $2.14/ea and shipping: US $2.74 - delivery to Oz. 

... but my peeve was about the practice of having a cheap item - say $1 - (often only very vaguely related to the real products) added into the mix of items DESCRIBED IN THE TITLE that might be $10-$20.  Stuffs up any search on price.

[PA0PBZ]

I get no $1 shipping offers, the cheapest item is $2.26 and $1.50 shipping. Putting that in the cart and it changes to $3.00 shipping.
But, going to the checkout and it changes back to $1.50 and even when cancelling and putting it in the cart again it now stays at $1.50. 

[Vince]

WOndering if anyone hit thisproblem... am currently shopping for a CF card to IDE adapter. Cheapest ones are these, photo below.

I searched on EBay and sorted bty cheapest " PRICE + SHIPPING "

I can't figure out why they put a freaking FEMALE IDE connector when the thing is supposed to replace a hard drive that obviously has a MALE connector 
They though one would plug them straight to the motherboard or what ?!

In your case the motherboard type is preferable, since it secures without any other problem; and if is on common cable with the CD, you can leave the CD alone on the cable.
One more thing to check: do you have extra floppy power  connector available? If not, you need ad adapter something like: https://www.ebay.com/itm/384981626421

Yep, just checked, no extra FDD power connector on this machine, as I thought.

Thanks for the link, though as I wrote above I was kinda hoping to make do with what I have here to save money and more shipping delay issues possibly... and looks like luckily I have enough stuff here to make my own adapter cable, look at that....  I just searched my junk and found this tiny male / female adapter cable... so all I need is solder a floppy power connector to that cable, and I have one from this harness from an old PSU. So I can make my own cable now... no need to butcher the computer's original harness 

As for plugging the adapter to the motherboard hmmm.... not sure. It's a huge tight mess in this area and cables would be exercising force onto the adapter, not great.
best to relocate the adapter a bit farther, where things are not as tight and crowded, so I might plug it on an IDE cable instead. Maybe put both the CF card and the original HDD on the same IDE cable.

But that's all details... I will se what works best once I have the CF adapter in my hands.
FDD power connector is now sorted so.... looks like I am good to go ?

Ah, need to fix the problem with the CD drive that refuses to boot !
Need a bootable CD drive to install the various OSes on the CF card.

I have x3 such old IBM Aptiva computers, so will try the CD drive from the other two, see if they boot or not.
Worse case, I can use the more modern CD / DVD writer from my main computer temporarily, just the time to install the OS on the CD card.
If none of these drives can boot then... well I guess it's rather a BIOS problem and not much I can do about it... 

[Specmaster]

Yeah, the listing he bought from rings up as +$3.60 SpeedPak shipping to me; three others all ring up with the free shipping as advertised.

No doubt poor Vince is getting slammed with a little froggy asshole tax because French Bureaucracy and customs.

mnem
 

Yeah but.. It is eBay USA, it knows I'm in the UK, but the shipping remains and it clearly states shipping to my post code, or as you Yanks call it zip code  go figure