Test Equipment Anonymous

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-risk-register-2026 The National Risk Register outlines the most serious risks facing the United Kingdom Banking and other financial infrastructure features too prominently. Unsurprisingly the government recommends keeping food and cash at home, jus...

I'm not up to date with such things.

We have credit card terminals connected to mobile phones. Traders now rely on them when their stall is in the middle of a field, or similar.

Non-traders don't have them, e.g. the person who sold me the VNA.

And then there's PayPal friends, of course.

As the original TEA thread is starting to slide down the TE page and in time will disappear onto P2 and beyond....it might be an idea to post a link to it in the OP of this thread by way of an edit to add it. https://teanonymous.com/f1/viewtopic.php?t=6&sid=8f73b110f51c4846d83eee43d97b2ec3 It w...

I probably had a couple of hundred quid on me, but that wasn't enough for the (rather good) VNA. Some of the tiny component testers are surprisingly useful as a first line tool for investigating components. Definitely not meteorological grade, but frequently sufficient. A good use case is measuring ...

Then there's loading on the walls and floor to consider. Weigh it carefully before going to the Model Engineering Exhibition this Thursday. It may turn out to be a life changing event. Consider Odysseus who blocked his crews' ears with wax and had himself tied to the mast, so he could hear the sire...

This weekend is the Model Engineering Exhibition at Leamington Exhibition Centre. If the weather looks nice, I might go, despite being adequately stocked for cutting tools etc. Model engineering suffers the same problems as amateur radio, so the number of exhibitions has fallen dramatically. I used...

MED6753 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 11, 2026 7:16 pm OK, It's not TE but it's my "go to" radio in the lab...

It is equipment for testing signal strength and atmospherics.

It seems the aim of school music teachers was to put children off music. Thumbs up for Scarlatti. I'll have to look for Vivaldi cello concertos. Agreed that not all Beethoven is wonderful, but the odd numbered symphonies and #5 piano concerto are. I remember seeing Peter Ustinov's anecdote on Parki...

Beethoven never manages to evoke any emotion in me. It didn't help that music lessons at school still had a distinct whiff of "Q: who is the best composer? A: Beethoven".

Vivaldi is OK, in an obvious unsubtle way. I prefer Scarlatti.

I was unclear and imprecise; classical music after Bach is impure. There are exceptions, but often the specific performance is important. Sometimes one performance is delightful whereas other performances of the same piece is turgid. The same is true of modern music; in many cases the sound engineer...

Others I'd pay to see include The Mediaeval Baebes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXrdfTSLWCY David Munrow, Music of the Gothic Era. Emma Kirkby, A Feather on the Breath of God. Both on yootoob, if you must. I wonder if their interpretation of early music manuscripts is correct. We'll never know, ...

As an old fogey, I'd point out that the pop/rock of today is rubbish compared to that of the 50s to 80s. Up to and including the 1950s, rock did not exist and pop was dominated by "Tin Pan Alley", where singers bought songs from composers. The composers tended to ape the big budget musica...

And consumers continue to ignore even that. Consider the tinny sounds emitted by small speakers in phones etc.

Yes, they are better than the handheld trannies of our youth, but that's a very low bar.

Remember postal orders? Oh yes! But they only worked in the UK. To buy stuff from the USA you needed an International Money Order, and about 6 weeks for shipping by sea. Bought an early digital clock IC, MM5314, and six "large" 7 segment displays (i.e. 0.5" high), and made the first ...

Ii met Birkett once. He had a stall at a radio rally in Worcester. I bought some germanium diodes from him. That must have been around 2001. It would have been a long haul to his shop in Lincoln. Target Electronics was a hobbyist electronics shop which was eclipsed by Maplin, which was more accessi...

I don't think there are any electronic junk shops left. i used to go to Centre Electronics in Birmingham, which closed abut 20 years ago. I believe Birketts in Lincoln is still there, run by his daughter. My 1740 came from there. https://rsgb.org/main/blog/news/silent-keys/2022/05/18/john-birkett-g...

Wow! That power supply is (as the seller honestly declares) "in bad shape". Whatever happened to it to cause that? Parachute failed to open? Anecdotally the Israeli equivalent is "run over by a tank" :) There used to be an electronic junk shop at Southampton that went by the nam...

Of the haul from there I've investigated so far, one 1740A seems to work but has knobs which are falling to bits, and the other doesn't produce a trace and I suspect has an EHT problem but is cosmetically good. You know, I've never really liked HP scopes. It's an itch I've now partially scratched. ...

Even so, their stuff was in better condition than this https://www.ebay.com/itm/366708551569 :o :shock: :o :shock: They're on some seriously good stuff if they think someone's going to pay ANYTHING for that. WTF, was it used as a chock for an M1 Abrams? -Pat I don't recall seeing anything offered f...

Even so, their stuff was in better condition than this https://www.ebay.com/itm/366708551569

Which pile did your stuff come from? Does something vaguely right, kaput, untested?

EC8010, Zenith and I were chatting about fA circuits and electrometers. I mentioned I had 1Tohm resitors (not IT resistors as described in the auction listing), and EC thinks it is worth posting pictures here. I expect he'll post some useful observations. This is the first time I've opened them. I h...

Robert wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2026 3:50 pm Nope, I was later. It was in a bin of grey plastic boxes that were described as APC7 articulated arms for VNAs. Always a risk buying active probes as they are so easily damaged.

Oh bugger. I specifically remember not looking in any of those boxes. Oh well.

I would have taken the 1145, but you got there first

Back in the 50s, 60s, 70s there was a lot of progress and a lot of "better than nothing" stuff around. It was worth looking at reviews to understand what was new and better and why. From the 80s onwards many of the analogue technologies had plateaued out, with only minor improvements. (CD ...