Test Equipment Anonymous

All large stores and almost all small shops in the UK take card payments and some prefer it. There are several traders and establishments which prefer cash or barter; scrap dealers, farmers and there are others more on the margins of society. At swapmeets a few sellers are geared up for card. Everyo...

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...

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 siren...

Are there many swapmeets you can reach through the year or is this the only one? In the UK there are four large hamfests I can get to (within 120 miles) and there may be others I don't go to because they are too far. There are several smaller ones within reasonable trevelling distance. I don't go to...

When "Satisfaction" was released here many famous bible thumpers wanted it banned because of the "suggestive" lyrics and they especially got their panties in a knot over Mick's "girly action". Funny how many of those same famous bible thumpers in later years were found...

Then there's boogie woogie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPKkBBFckE4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBQ19DsE6Vk

I must get back to dealing with the accumulated TE.

If you stray from The Four Seasons, done to death in adverts, which is four concertos in a set of twelve called The Contest Between Harmony and Invention, you might investigate his cello concertos, which are sublime. There's no question in my mind that Vivaldi had nailed it. Bach was also consistent...

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. With YouTube you can explore it without shelling out. Both of these I will investigate. I ...

Related. IMHO the most iconic, famous, and instantly recognizable rock song intro is this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrIPxlFzDi0&list=RDnrIPxlFzDi0&start_radio=1 It's subjective of course but for me me it's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5Atiz3PgCM Jack Bruce and Pete Brown h...

As an old fogey, I'd point out that the pop/rock of today is rubbish compared to that of the 50s to 80s. So there's no incentive for quality reproduction. And in the race to the bottom in cheapness, a lot of current recordings are of poor technical quality even before reaching the bottle neck of MP...

Apparently the Crowdhill stuff has gone "All items have now been disposed of..." Let me guess. A gold bug arrived with a big van, looked it over, flashed £200 readies, they were getting fed up with it, and they bit. Job done. Probably just as well and my work trip is delayed. You looked i...

A 20H 100mA choke from Sowter is about £125, so a good deal.

Then the transformer and other bits recovered may be good.

Target electronics: https://www.bristol.org.uk/info/645/ But if you look at gurgle maps/streetview, you will see signs still up in 2008, but the building hadn't quite fallen down in 2017. It always was shaky, and I wondered how it stayed afloat. Curiously I visited it in the early-mid 70s, when my ...

I believe there was also a Greenweld in Southampton. I think it was the only Greenweld. I mail ordered from them, when they had a sale. 250 assorted transistors for £1.25. 250 assorted 1% and 2% resistors for £1.25. There was easily enough good stuff in their assorted bags to cover the cost. They m...

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 accessib...

When I was a kid, I couldn't afford new components, so I used to walk four miles to the Rediffusion repair shop and salvage components from the televisions in the skip outside. I don't think there are any electronic junk shops left. i used to go to Centre Electronics in Birmingham, which closed abu...

[I had a 1740, and quite liked its large screen and 50ohm input. Arguably 465s are better, but it is a very closely run race. I didn't like the way the timebase switch abraded PCB tracks (fixable), and I believe the bridge rectifier is weak. The timebase markings had poor contrast and were difficul...

Ii's definitely worth looking out for tatty old gear, or TE which is specialised and obsolete, for parts, if it's going cheap. The case, pots, transformer, and particular components would cost a fortune if bought new. Even things like feet and knobs are surprisingly expensive new. One of the attract...

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...

The Crowdhill trove is maintaining its record of nothing working properly. He was a compulsive junkhound. No question about it. He bagged everything thrown out, but didn't seem focused on fixing it. Of the haul from there I've investigated so far, one 1740A seems to work but has knobs which are fal...

He wouldn't have pinched it. Most of the items are too big and heavy to make that likely and there's too much of it. For an organisation of any size, the value of much surplus equipment (obsolete, beyond economic repair) is not worth thinking about. Attitudes to disposing of surplus equipment vary a...

I've no experience at all of 1T resistors, but I'd imagine there are very respectable insulators with less resistance. I'd have thought producing meaningful results from them was a considerable exercise in advanced practical physics. Things you wouldn't normally consider, such handling them with you...

Unfortunately all of the units I've looked at soo far have had issues like water damage, incomplete repairs of poor quality and critical parts robbed. One had a downright deadly modification of two C14 mains inlets. The original HP one on the back and another one on the side wired in parallel. So a...