Test Equipment Anonymous

I am well aware of the underspend issue. As our American friends would say, "That's no way to run a rail road!" I made sure our section had the test gear we needed to do the job we had to do. What the underspend issue says is that the management running the company is more concerned with ...

I thin you'll find that if you put an inline terminator on a 1M//15pF scope, the termination will be 50ohm//15pF. That 15pF is a bugger at >50MHz or so, of course.

A better termination would include a 3/6/10dB pad, on the principle that gain is cheap but you can't recover a mis-terminated signal.

I'd compare that with the 1ns risetime cal out. There is a slight capacitive (downwards) blip 2 divisions after the rise. I'd check whether the position of that depended on the cable length. My preference is to have a pulser attached directly to the input, to minimise degradation due to cable attenu...

Started tweaking the calibration on the P11 485. First on the agenda was to clean the attenuator switch decks, especially the 1M path. They were dirty. A dab of deoxit then flush with 100% IPA and blow dry. The 50 ohm path on both channels looks pretty good. 10MHz square. The trailing edge ringing ...

Cubdriver wrote: ↑Fri Dec 05, 2025 5:36 pm Now she gripes because her phone keeps changing it to 'wilder' when she's texting about him.

Is that actually inappropriate? This is a cat, after all.

Could she add widlar to the computer's dictionary.

Under normal conditions, I am mostly a dog person, by character. When I'm ill, however, I instantly become a cat person Daughter left her "high energy" dog for me to look after while she was abroad on holiday. :) She also left covid :( Against all reasonable expectations, the dog recognis...

I'm amazed you were able to snap a picture of Widlar near a cat box; ours collide in the cat flap as they desperately run away the moment the box comes out. Daughter's dog's record at the vets has an annotation; "MUST be sedated". When properly sedated his long tongue flops out the side o...

Arguably you don't have to be a stallholder; you only have to pay a fee to be a stallholder.

Over here the difference is much less than the petrol to get to the rally.

While pickled herring can be nice (if not sweet cured :) ), they are very different. These are smoked and partially dried, with some salt. They were designed to be stored and moved inland on horses. Hence it is one thing I don't worry about going off in the post - and should reach you ok. Except, of...

There seem to be many such places nowadays, with kippers from Craster, Whitby, the SW, and Highlands. They all seem to be £9/pair, with free shipping above ~£45. An interesting alternative is https://peskyfish.co.uk/ They specialise in very fresh fish, including live lobsters. The the stock varies d...

Mail order was a significant business in the UK, probably from the end of the 19th century. There were general catalogues; Kays, Grattan, Littlewoods, with local agents. There were specialised catalogues, such as Buck and Hickman for tools and industrial supplies. and various others. There were mai...

This is largely true. Supermarkets cream off a lot of trade in basic items, smaller sellers would have had as bread and butter. Garden stuff, tools, kitchenware, making it harder for independent shops to exist. There are very few butchers and fishmongers these days. ... The internet has had a big e...

If memory serves, it's a single 100nF polystyrene. A close tolerance Soviet 100n silvered mica (suitably tweaked) is all that would be required. Seriously. I've measured a few recently and they are very good. I've finally bothered to look at the manual, and you are right: "0.1% plastic", ...

I once went to a shop where the assistant knew their stuff. It was almost thirty years ago, but the experience made an impression on me. Shopping underwent a big change for the worse in the late 80s. It used to be that each shop had a specialism, and they became masters of the subject. Benefits: if...

Parking near Richer Sounds on Whiteladies Rd (i.e. East Clifton where the commerce is) is much easier than in Clifton Village (where all the slave traders and merchants lived safely away from those terrible docks). I know, because my parents house was just off Blackboy Hill. Whiteladies, Blackboy ge...

Kitchen stuff is often expensive, now that it's fashionable for people to try to emulate Nigella Lawson or Gordon Ramsay. I can do the swearing bit when things go wrong, but not the glamour. I found Nigella flirting with me to be off-putting. The food should be more pornographic than the chef! The ...

Well, that was a good pre-Christmas day: a good start followed by three miracles. Flogged two auction/hamfest treasures, one for 100% profit, the other for 2500% (or was it 5000%?) profit. More importantly I found a nearby shop that solved some Christmas/birthday problems. I'd been trogging around m...

Practice makes perfect. I found the TF2700 very nice to use. And it can quite easily be made more accurate. After all, it's only a bridge. The resistors on the large knob are only 2%, so they can easily be improved. Likewise, the range switch can be changed to 0.1%. Everything reactive is compared ...

The counter to that would be Anne, and Edward+Sophie, who seems to do a reasonable low-key job. Wish Anne would keep her cows in her own fields; I've had to play cowboy to get a herd off the runway. Mind you, at least they could be chased away. Two miles away on Minchinhampton Common, the damn thin...

The whole point of twiddling the knobs on a TF2700 is to make you think about whether the answer is plausible; always question the number on an LCD display, where it be on a calculator or test equipment. Yes, you need to know the expected answer before you measure it. It is surprisingly difficult t...

Zenith wrote: ↑Mon Dec 01, 2025 12:37 pm That cat has an air of brooding malevolence and barely contained rage.

That's standard: they all do.

At least it appreciates a good scope. I hope hairs don't get in any of the mechanical mechanisms

402V. OK, 2% low from 415V, but nothing to worry about. I'll have a look in my incoming box, but I'll be amazed if all three phases are there. My understanding is that houses in the UK are wired sequentially with phases down the street; whereabouts are you to have three-phase? Yes, repeat no. There...

I've made a lot of test gear in steel cake tins and tobacco tins. (If it can keep stuff fresh, it's good for keeping EMC out.) Didn't look much, but the laughter stopped and throughtful expressions appeared when people saw results better than (expensive) commercial equipment. Nothing beats skill an...

The counter to that would be Anne, and Edward+Sophie, who seems to do a reasonable low-key job. Wish Anne would keep her cows in her own fields; I've had to play cowboy to get a herd off the runway. Mind you, at least they could be chased away. Two miles away on Minchinhampton Common, the damn thing...

tggzzz wrote: ↑Tue Nov 25, 2025 4:26 pm Quite a few of mine are like that, some with the date barely legible. Nobody cared; they were just used.

To finish the topic, here are two pictures of coins I found in my pocket...
Two queens, old any young
Two ages
1d and ¹/₂d
1863 * 3
1901
1966
One too warn to tell, but an early Victoria