Test Equipment Anonymous

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...

There's gold in that thar junk, or so I'm told. I haven't investigated. You may not be that hard up anyway.

Otherwise, Xmas and birthday gifts for nerdy friends, or attention catching bargains if you have a rally stall. You would be doing your bit to avoid e-waste and save the planet.

There was still a fair bit left after I'd filled the back of the car. With price of fuel it would not have been worth my driving there but I had to go within 10 miles for work for a couple of days so not so bad. Might have to go back to the work location next week. That's the main stack. There were...

Things get cheaper and easier to make as technology improves. With test equipment, the big names HPAK, Tek, R&S etc, found what would have been a top end instrument commanding a hefty price in 1970, was pretty much a commodity by 1990. They had to move further up the food chain and offer more ca...

I have KEF C95s I've had for 35 years. They suit me. If they suit you then don't scratch that tickle; it will only turn into an itch. It always struck me that the hi-fi industry was a treadmill. You'd buy something and a year later see endless articles recommending upgrades to the new wonder from y...

Was that near Southampton? may have been the same one... Yes, Crowdhill. Ah you missed the good stuff... ;) There was still a fair bit left after I'd filled the back of the car. With price of fuel it would not have been worth my driving there but I had to go within 10 miles for work for a couple of...

Reminds me, I ought to flog my Rogers Studio 1. No use to me any more :cry: Are you sure? But if you are, sell them now because they are deteriorating all the time. i suppose that's true of all loudspeakers. I have KEF C95s I've had for 35 years. They suit me. The unobtainium ferrofluid tweeters ha...

She knows what a true hoard is. She watches those hoarding shows, both the UK version as well as the US/Canada version. She just likes to bust my balls. :shock: :D She thinks she knows what a true hoard is. She has theoretical notions about hoarding. i doubt she's had to live with one. You have con...

Blondie sez my lab is a hoard. Tell her she's never seen a hoard. From the photos you have a modest and well-ordered collection. I've seen a three story house with the cellar and each floor packed with communication receivers. I bought a couple of them. There was a huge Marconi diversity receiver a...

A success story. A few days diversion and a right result.

I'm glad it worked out. Buying something like that sold as spares or repairs, with a reputation for having an unobtainium part fail, is always going to be a gamble.

I have just made sense of the Keithley 610C circuit diagram. Drawn by a nutter, the input stage (where the unobtainium input MOSFETs are) is upside down with positive rail at the top and negative at the bottom. The unobtainiums are P-channel enhancement MOSFETs. If my £10 610C has destroyed MOSFETs...

At the estate sale on Monday, there was a bookcase, so I had to see what was in it. A copy of the Radio Designer's Handbook still with its original fly cover was tempting, but the book that really caught my eye was "How To Make Better Landings (Revised edition)" I've got a copy of the Rad...