Test Equipment Anonymous

Blacksmith's forges and chainsaws, there must be chainsaws, nothing less than a 36" bar though. It's the only way.

somehow I always expect you guys to show off your hybrid wafer and die wire bonding setups. instead we see engine lathes and welders. stone knives and bearskins. You need the space for a tool, to be able to afford it (not so bad these days with a lot of good used equipment around), and an amount of...

And in the bottom photo a Lincoln MIG set. I've got a modern inverter MIG set, which also does MMA. I haven't used it for a time, but it paid for itself welding patches on the bottom of my Ford Mondeo, before it got beyond and had to be scrapped. The MMA function is OK, but I have a couple of MMA in...

I hope you are having a nice time. Is it a fairly relaxed day of eating and drinking too much, or is it a family thing where you are obliged to invite relatives you don't see very often? Then they kick off on politics, or their great interest in some sport nobody is interested in, or some family row...

No, I don't know what it was I saw at Newbury, but it wasn't a Pultra; it was nice, but not super, and I'd have snapped up anything of that quality for £70. And as for an Emco for £50... A Unimat? I've always been interested in machine tools and have seen what they can do. Modern life depends on th...

but if you really want to set her off .....call camilla the new "queen" and stand back because she starts winding up like a gas turbine about to take off. Have you tried her with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and his delightful semi-ex Fergie? You could spice the mix by pointing out that he...

Changing the subject, I thought I'd indulge in some pre-Christmas quality control this evening. We bought some 15yr Glenmorangie last week. First off, the bottle was fitted with a huge child-proof knob the size of a coffee cup over its neck. I had to resort to a hacksaw to cut the thing away. Sadly...

I haven't had Glenmorangie for years. I recall it was one of the nicer ones, with what I'd call a rounded flavour and not too fiery. I thought Highland Park was similar but smoother still. Just the thing for a winter night with the rain lashing against the windows. The Scottish whisky industry prefe...

Anybody got any idea about how I could spend or change paper Euros? What about old euros issued in Italy being accepted in France? I wasn't aware there was any difference in Euro notes across the EU, regardless of the issuing nation's code, nor that any were considered expired would only be accepte...

As a kid I used to look all the time, partly through boredom, and partly because old coins were still in circulation, even though grossly eroded. I have many Edwardian and Victorian coins, the oldest being 1863. I seem to recall having had a small booklet listing prices of each coin/date. A lot of ...

Apparently Charles III coins have been issued for general circulation for two years or more. I can't say I've noticed any, but I don't particularly look. Charles III bank notes have been around for over a year. I'd guess over 95% of bank notes are still Elizabeth II. There seem to be more £5 and £10...

Silent key stalls often have bargains. I bought a TF2700 for £15 for a friend at the beginning of the year. Bargain! That's what I tried to tell tggzzz after I pointed a TF2700 to him, and he bought it at the W-s-M rally a year back, for the same modest amount. It's been a sore topic ever since. Hi...

I don't take any interest in ham gear, hi-fi (of which there is generally little) domestic radios, tape recorders, disco equipment etc. My observation of buying test gear from rallies is about the same as yours and is this. Not much changes hands for more than £200. I don't recall ever being outrigh...

Having said that, to my surprise and annoyance, I picked up a nice HP 3GHz VNA boat anchor at a local small hamfest And at the same rally the year before, you picked up that excellent Marconi TF2700 LCR bridge, also to your surprise and annoyance. Rallies have advantages in that the prices are bett...

I'm sure I saw someone struggling away with one, risking rupture and spine damage under the weight of it, a couple of years back at the Chippenham winter rally.

You mentioned that £15 had been parted with.

Now this gold harvesting thing, well it may not be entirely unjustified and to be despised.

The scene has changed, as scenes are prone to do. Back around 1990 I was discussing with my manager (degree in EE and keen radio amateur who had drifted into software) what we were going to squander our bonuses on. I said Stewart of Reading was offering Tek 475s for £600, on special offer and I was ...

I'm looking at the HTML version in FireFox and the bottom of it is garbled. eg Solartron 7150 PSU 0-35V 0-2A 2 meters £30 Plus PSU 0-30V 0-2A digital £50 Solartron 7075 Function Generator 0.002-2MHZ TTL etc Kenwood £65 When constructing web pages for something important, it's as well to review them ...

S of R used to be a thriving business. The last time I spoke to him I got the impression it was more or less a retirement activity. He was rueful about the fact that the days had gone where he could place ads in the electronics mags, WW etc and the world was a straightforward place. This internet st...

Dealers like Stewart of Reading sell with a month's guarantee, and if they sell something as working, it works. I bought a Tek 475 which I used regularly for ten years. In that time a reservoir capacitor died and a small signal transistor expired. It still works now. It was probably 30 years old whe...

I was hoping someone might come up with an example of the use of an E810F. And another one I've never seen a use for is E55L. I have some of both. It was used as the output tube in the vertical power amplifier of the 581A/585A. Except they called it the 7788. I thought everyone knew that :-). https...

A telephone switching matrix avoiding electromechanical parts. That makes sense. A lot of work was done on automatic dialing over the years. Plessey were very much involved in it in the 60s and 70s. https://www.communicationsmuseum.org.uk/emuseum/phoneswitching/7.phphtml It looks as if BT didn't wan...

You have to remember that audio in the 1960s was already so expensive that E88CC was far too costly to be used. And yes, you'd need DC heaters, which were a problem at the time. The internal screens in EF86 were actually guards to reduce grid current and allow the valve to be used as a (pretty poor...

Mechanical relays were used in telephone exchanges with an unplanned down time of a couple of hours per decade. I've also seen them used in telemetry outstations. They are usually specified with the minimum number of operations they are expected to last, which can be a very high number. DMMs may be ...

Maybe some sort of relay system for a system of lights, maybe runway lights. Redundancy would be expected in a safety critical system. If so, it isn't obvious why they didn't just use relays because LDRs always have some resistance. Incandescent lamps have a limited life of a few hundred hours, depe...

The square thing looks like an LDR, so with the lamp some sort of photo-coupler, possibly for amplitude limitation. A similar thing was used as one of the various sorts of feedback methods used in ultra-low distortion audio oscillators, when they were looking for something better than a lamp or spec...