Test Equipment Anonymous

Mesmerising Game of Life on steroids. https://www.sagejenson.com/36points/ Use control panel dropdown on the top right to choose from 40 examples, and diddle the parameters. I rather like "growing on a sea of sand". Some patterns take 30s to settle down, and unsurprisingly the starting poi...

Realism: you didn't say "find the faulty tant"

My Netgear Amour program blocked that site as potential malware. You may want to scan your computer. Worth knowing. Only spotted PDFs and JPGs. Browser plugins uBlock Origin, AdGuard AdBlocker both blocked matomo.js and didn't indicate any other javascript running. Privacy Badger spotted nothing Ru...

Looks like someone has scraped EEVBlog Forum to extract links to test equipment documents etc. That means all the, say, Tek1502 stuff is in one directory and easier to find using the eevblog search farcility https://docs.ampnuts.ru/eevblog.docs/ Go up a directory and other places have been scraped t...

... There is something of the robot from "The Forbidden Planet" about it. ... Lovely evocative description! "Here's one I prepared earlier" https://teanonymous.com/f1/viewtopic.php?p=10331#p10331 w.r.t. Piccadilly Circus and Petula Clark. (That was and probably still is a classi...

That lot should see you through the winter :) You are probably safe from those RF amplifiers, given the indicated voltages! I used to want a Markus, and now they are a blast from the past[1]. Having tried to use one, I ran into a problem that is all too common in posts on The Other Plaice. What is a...

A recent PPAuction (=>sight unseen, farm barn storage) realised £400 (add +37% uplift) for this lot: Tektronix 7854 oscilloscope with 7A26, 7A13, 2x 7B85 plug ins, 7854 waveform calculator keyboard & 4 extra plug in modules, 7L12 spectrum analyser 0.1MHz-1800MHz, 7S12 TDR/sampler with S6 & S...

Measuring ESR is an interesting topic. If you just consider sine waves a standard lumped model of capacitors, then the ESR and dissipation factor are interchangeable. My strong suspicion is that the dissipation factor is quoted because it measurable on a standard bridge. But in a real modern circuit...

If the sampler is anything like the 1502, then there will be some trimpots/caps that need to be adjusted to ensure sampling does occur. That's easy in the 1502 since there's no need for extender cards.

As for accuracy, I regard it as sufficient for a quick pass/fail test or sanity check - a bit like an old 2% analogue multimeter. A bit better than that. I've just checked it with a couple of 1.2k 0.01% resistors and it says both are 1198R. I make that < 0.2%. My Brymen 867s says both of those resi...

Glad you like it.

The guts is probably the same as many things on fleabay, but I like the ability to use leads for big components and the pads for SMD components.

As for accuracy, I regard it as sufficient for a quick pass/fail test or sanity check - a bit like an old 2% analogue multimeter.

Interesting; thanks. That gives me a simple test and a potentially simple cure. It still isn't clear to me whether it is the VNA connectors, crap sacrificial connectors, or crap cables, or the combination of one connector with another. Currently I suspect is a crap sacrificial connector possibly wit...

Nice "little" VNA (my 8720C is 6U high). I'm glad you can see it has advantages over the tiny and nano VNAs. Reading the other thread I think you both got a good deal at £375. I had a 8754A & S parameter test set (both 2.6GHz version) at National Hamfest and didn't get any interest ot...

Not worth a thread on its own, so here are a couple of pictures of the Agilent 8714ES 3GHz RF Network Analyser I picked up today at a hamfest https://teanonymous.com/f1/viewtopic.php?p=11438#p11438 I almost didn't buy it because I already have reasonable 3GHz NanoVNA, and this nominally duplicates t...

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...

The main ones from my point of view are Newbury, Dunstable Downs and FRARS. Telford is pretty good. Rugby is OK and it's a nice drive up the Fosse Way (popular with bikers). Yup. Good weather and having found an interesting precioussss previously always help. MK and Andover have been OK. Never been...

Got an open container of IPA at home? If you see any white crystals in it, gently put it down, run away, and call the bomb squad.... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468170924000754 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379711225000347 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.102...

MED6753 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 18, 2025 7:13 pm I was looking at the 7L12 pictures and all the calibration points most likely requiring massive amounts of highly expensive TE.

I don't see the problem.


Of course.

The caps are reasonably large and should lift off cleanly. I only have a hot air gun and a Metcal. My limited experience is that crudely cutting most of the caps off makes it easier to remove the remainder. The little remaining has lower thermal mass, and the thinness means it is easier to use hot ...

The only place I normally use shrouded probes is with my Fluke 25 or Metrix MX67 handheld DMMs. That's because I might be measuring high voltages, or I want to noodle around with the probes looking for something odd. Otherwise I want to clip a bench meter (HP34410/K2015/etc) to a board etc, and/or h...

Apart from TE, they can produce hauls of components, manuals, books, and other things. You have to look under the stalls and sift through the boxes of assorted items. They are a good place to pick up quality BNC cables and things like that. Doubly so for good quality SMA cables! Look at the new pri...

At last, some interesting uses for smartphone... physics experiments using the phone sensors. https://phyphox.org/ One example is a chirped sonar. Another is using the accelerometer to see heart rate. It also shows raw sensor readings, e.g. number of GPS satellites and horizontal/vertical accuracy 6...

Nowadays if I want something,I go to fleabay.

The thing I like about rallies is serendipity, which rarely strikes ;( Hence like to visit somewhere else afterwards.

TNMoC is a standard after DDARC, but I've had a couple of pleasant surprises this year, q.v.

Thanks for the report. It sounds as if "national hamfest" is either a relic or aspirational :( I doubt I'll ever get there, unless I decide to make a mini-break of it. Not sure what I would want to go and see in Lincolnshire, though. Maybe on the way to or from Yorkshire and some places in...

We are used to fast transistors switching in ps. Now we have to get used to switching in as, attoseconds, 10 -18 s. Yup, forget GHz, forget THz, this is PHz territory. ...demonstrating a current on/off switching effect on a ~630 attosecond scale (~1.6 petahertz speed)... https://www.planetanalog.com...