Test Equipment Anonymous

I had a poke around and found that one of its LT1027-5 5V references was only producing -4V, and noisy at that. Amazingly, I had an LT1027-5 in stock. Admittedly in the old TO5 package, but with care its leads went into the 8-pin DIL holes. It's now a proper goer! I looked up the list price of an AD...

The ADA 400A was mentioned at the other place and was the subject of some haphazard reverse engineering. Essentially, it's a differential input (two BNCs) to single-ended output on TekProbe interface. Gain is variable; 0.1, 1, 10, 100, and bandwidth is variable; 100Hz, 3kHz, 100kHz, >1MHz, but the i...

That's a very unusual Farnell power supply; never knew they made a programmable version. In the 80s and 90s, Farnell LT30 supplies were ubiquitous in teaching and at the BBC. Wireless World was full of adverts for them from the 70s onwards. As mentioned, they also made quite reasonable signal genera...

It turned out to be a switch on the Optimod at the studio being in the wrong position, or so the Tech there said. That'll be the power switch. Set to "On". Horrible things beloved by station engineers who believe that people tune radios by stopping at the loudest station. (Maybe they did ...

"Here's one I prepared earlier" (That was and probably still is a classic phrase from a UK children's TV programme) Still is. I used to use it when I was teaching to introduce a demonstration and the kids knew the reference. In my final job, we often had to make things light-tight (surpri...

Wow, some treasures there! (Although I'd skip the Engelbert Humperdinck LP.)

It sounds as if you live between Newbury and Reading and like to go by motorbike, which would be a bit limiting should you drop on some 19" gear you couldn't resist. You'd be amazed at what you can get on the back of a bike with three bungies (and I have four). I brought a (small) power hacksa...

It seems a common whinge here is that there are unwashed/unkempt and poorly dressed individuals at radio rallies, but radio hams are Beau Brummel compared to the types you get at model engineering events. Many years ago, there was a chap at Thornbury MEX (Model Engineering eXhibition) where you had ...

I mentioned to another member about defluxing and it was suggested that I start a thread on the subject... We start with soldering. "Proper" solder is 60/40, hopefully modified by 2-3% silver (makes much better joints). Years ago, there used to be adverts for Multicore solder with a pictur...