Test Equipment Anonymous

If you need more than 3 1/2 digits, you have done a marginal design :-) Or, you're trying science the real way. I've got a couple 4 1/2 digits handhelds, and a 5 1/2 bench DMM (3478A) where the former owner bodged a battery swap. If I score the 6209a I'm ogling a the moment, I'll make an effort into...

Having 3 phase mains is nice if you have a lot of big industrial machines. For smaller stuff a VFD gives additional advantages like variable speed including higher speeds. soft starting, dynamic braking and active motor protection. Robert. Many VFDen are built to take three phases in and make three...

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? Just below 1% under t...

Robert, thank you so much for your post. I was well aware of the difference in torque ripple between single and three phase motors and was wondering whether my heavily tweaked Hobbymat lathe (bought new) would benefit from a three-phase motor, so I bought it a three-phase motor. Annoyingly, my stat...

tggzzz wrote: ↑Tue Nov 25, 2025 5:15 pm
Anybody got any idea about how I could spend or change paper Euros?

Visit EU? France is fast reached via the Eurostar. You probably (but no guarantees) can pay in Euros already in the bistro car en route. Given the ticket price it would be a hideous exchange rate, of course.

PNP BJTs are very slightly quieter than NPN. It's generally <1dB, mind. Oooh er! Hadn't considered that. Anybody buying aged test equipment for its valves is an idiot; if not worn out, the valves will be well on their way. Would I buy a DMM using nixies? Not really; I want better accuracy than was ...

I guarantee I can break this if I have access to add DNS records :) You (and other interested parties) do not have that access, and it is not only a matter of admin access to DNS; there are other checks and balances in place too. But in principle, I do not doubt there are vulnerable points in this....

I use a parser generator (I wrote one) for that and a proper language. The only way. Some of the stuff I see people parsing with awk/perl is horrifying. awk makes for a pretty powerful and always efficient parser if your file format is remotely decent. Latest thing I wrote for money in it is a thin...

That's the whole idea! You find the page in the manual regarding calibration and turn the 'Required Instruments' bit into a shopping list as you now have justification because you need them. (Then get manuals for THOSE instruments and repeat this process ad infinitum...) :twisted: :twisted: This so...

mnementh wrote: ↑Sat Sep 13, 2025 8:20 pm
Gonna go pop a mess o' "Tektronix Zits", ehhh?

Yah, that.

Recently I had reason to ponder over age and such, since it was an annual day related to birth. In the gift pile there was a desoldering hot tweezers set, the Sequre HT-140 that's been doing the rounds: CuriousMarc reported favourably on it , and MadHacker over on Discord said similar things, so I p...

Thursday morning this is what I found on the bed just beside my feet.

I was just wondering when the cat would enter the discussion.

I would assume those empty stand offs between the plug-in's and CRT would be where the readout board would go. Looking at the page for the 5110 mainframe in TekWiki I don't see any mention of readouts in that line. Mine, being 54xx series, does have it, as standard. Actually, Option No. 1 for the 5...

This CRT is not as bright as I think it should be and it exhibits double peaking which indicates lots of hours. I see. Mine is possibly a bit better. And has readouts. Probably peak analog audio scope in some ways that. Low bandwidth, large CRT, lots of inputs (I've 4 on mine, 2 per module) and ver...

MED6753 wrote: ↑Tue May 27, 2025 7:28 pm Calibrations. First up, the 5A15N Vertical Amplifier.

That series of CRT are gorgeous to look at! I really like mine too.

MED6753 wrote: ↑Mon May 26, 2025 6:32 pm It works. Now I can proceed with calibration of the 3 plug-in's.

Excellent. I'll finish up the necessary mods on my JAMMA cable and go at my 5440, and as soon as I locate the custom Tek IC I bought for

${MUCH}

, there's hopefully going to be chooching horizontals or if not, an expensive fire.

Finally managed to get a good pic of the new house mistress. Having one that absorbs light makes for complicated photography.

I have a search out för Lindström pliers all the time. I buy selectively, but yes, they're the best in both needle nose and side cutters for small work. Coarser jobs get shifted to Bahco, Knipex or similar. I've a couple Knipex Superknips flush cutters that do stellar service, for instance. They riv...

vk6zgo wrote: ↑Thu May 15, 2025 6:35 am
We used Fernseh PGM 75s to sweep any video equipment which used keyed clampers, etc, as it had provision to insert syncs & blanking.

Caught at the German Technology Museum this summer:

So it appears that the only real solution is the purchase a proper hp branded spectrum analyzer. I'll put it on my "wish" list. You need at least two -- one for LF and one for RF. I've got a 8592L for the RF part, which sadly is a bit deaf. It's on one of the kitchen tables in somewhat di...

The 5245L is a wonderful machine, and it is certainly a rite of passage for TEA people. Of course I have one, here in very good company: https://vvv.besserwisser.org/Public/Bilder/tea/8592-5245L.jpeg I did however get bitten earlier, by this little one: https://vvv.besserwisser.org/Public/Bilder/tea...

MED6753 wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 5:46 pm You guys kill me. Suggesting I go down all sorts of rabbit holes.

My Siglent SDS1052DL does have some basic FFT functions but I trust my crusty old eyeballs.

Just sayin'.

While bumbling around looking for a picture of a hand card punch, I came across https://hoc.lgfl.org.uk/resource.html Short videos of what there is at TNMoC, plus other stuff. Looks like it is a KS2/3 teacher's resource. There's a hand punch available at the CHM in Mountain View. I've operated it. ...

That meter looks like it cleaned up really nicely. Do you know of a source of pin plug test leads? I have two meters that use them but no leads. I was going to try test fitting a mini-banana plug connector into a pin socket and see if it fits and is workable but haven't had a chance yet. IIRC Probe...