Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) : Discussion and Group Therapy Thread

[25 CPS]

I came back from a vacation late Wednesday night and found this notice tucked in the front door handle:



I've never received advance notice of a power shutoff before and none of the line powered clocks in the house had lost time or reset so I figured the work had been deferred to the 31st. This turned out to be the case since the electricity went out right at 9:00 AM sharp yesterday morning. I decided to go to a restaurant and have breakfast and when I went outside, I got to see the hydro company doing their work a couple of houses down:



They were installing two new poles and a new distribution transformer.



This is the old Ferranti-Packard transformer being lowered to the ground. This transformer might be original to when the street was built in the early 1940s. I got to talk with one of the guys on the work crew and the new transformer has a larger kVA rating than the one they removed but the distribution voltage is still 4160. If it is the original transformer, the size has more to do with the core being designed to pass 25 Hz than any large kVA rating and the guy I was speaking with mentioned that transformer capacity was becoming an issue. Here, houses built in that era typically all had 60 amp services and the electricity distribution system would've been designed around that when it was built for the neighbourhood. Since then, with most houses being rewired with new 100 or 200 amp services, everything designed around all of houses having 60 amp services has become oversubscribed. Now that air conditioning is standard and things like electric car chargers etc. are becoming more common, I can see how current draws could be large enough at times to cause problems for the old infrastructure.

The hydro company did file plans with the Ontario Energy Board a few years ago that proposed replacing the existing distribution infrastructure so that the secondary voltage from the Hydro One interconnects was carried all the way to local pole mounted transformers to avoid having large neighbourhood substations and an extra step of conversion to an intermediate distribution voltage like the 4160 V in my neighbourhood. I don't know if that plan got cancelled though. Hopefully they aren't doing major infrastructure work only to have to replace it soon with another round of major infrastructure work.

Interestingly, the whole time I've lived here, the line voltage has always been a touch high, usually between 126-128 volts outside of peak air conditioning time. The new transformer's been set up to deliver a few volts less and the plug-in voltmeters now show around 124 volts instead.

[mansaxel]

Given how safety critical they are, I really think headlights and turn signals should be designed so that the bulbs are easily field-replaceable, ideally without any tools, but that's just my opinion and clearly not one shared by all of the automakers.

The 2007 Volvo V70 I have has horrible access to headlights -- the front is indeed intended to come off -- but they took notice of all the flak they received, and from 2008 and onwards, you pop the bonnet, pull 2 long pins out, disconnect the umbilical, and you have the entire headlight assembly in your hand, and can do bulb replacements on the bench. Things do get better. In some areas. The 2001 model I had before had the same horror fitting of the headlight assembly, but its engine bay was much less crowded, it being naturally aspirated petrol instead of turbo charged diesel as the newer one is. Thus it was pretty easy to swap bulbs in a pinch. I remember doing it in a back yard in Celle, Germany, one fine summer morning. The most cumbersome part of that was getting to the spares -- they were under the floor of the boot, which of course was choc full with our luggage, seeing as we were on a long vacation trip...

[Robert]

I mentioned Johns Radio a few days ago. Purely by coincidence I was looking at an archive disk today and came across the catalog for the "closing down" sale in 2002. John was not happy with the result and claimed that the buyers had conspired to keep prices low. No such thing happened. The auction was poorly promoted, the catalog came out far too late, had no photos and lots of errors. On the day of sale lot numbers had changed and items moved. A Saturday was odd for a trade sale too. About 2300 lots and a 10AM start meant less than 15 seconds per lot with no breaks. Bids were very low. I'm not a dealer and was avoiding "boat anchors" but had to stop bidding when I reckoned my small van was full. I still had cash left.
Also of note thet it was all stuff from Smithies Mill not the "good" kit in the Whitehall Road works.

[25 CPS]

I mentioned Johns Radio a few days ago. Purely by coincidence I was looking at an archive disk today and came across the catalog for the "closing down" sale in 2002. John was not happy with the result and claimed that the buyers had conspired to keep prices low. No such thing happened. The auction was poorly promoted, the catalog came out far too late, had no photos and lots of errors. On the day of sale lot numbers had changed and items moved. A Saturday was odd for a trade sale too. About 2300 lots and a 10AM start meant less than 15 seconds per lot with no breaks. Bids were very low. I'm not a dealer and was avoiding "boat anchors" but had to stop bidding when I reckoned my small van was full. I still had cash left.
Also of note thet it was all stuff from Smithies Mill not the "good" kit in the Whitehall Road works.

I picked up an Eico 950 capacitor tester during the pandemic from an elderly gentleman who owned a machine shop. He told me about how he had the business contents auctioned off when he retired and he was similarly unhappy at what the auction yielded. He laid the blame at the feet of the auctioneer for similar reasons. Everything was poorly managed leading up to the auction itself and the selling prices were low. I guess general business liquidators really aren't cut out to properly prepare and sell items specialty technical shops effectively. That was the big complaint the guy had about the auctioneer, that he didn't know what he was dealing with. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about it by the time the auction was underway and expensive, valuable items were being sold for a pittance.

[25 CPS]

I got a marketing email from Rhode & Schwartz the other day. They had the fill out a form to receive an RF spectrum allocation poster promotion going on and that made me realize something:

I filled out that promotion several years ago and I never received the poster.

Then I realized I filled out a Keysight promotion form even longer ago for one of those RF PCB rulers they were giving away and I never received that either.

This leaves me wondering if these large companies are hyping up promotional giveaways to get people to fill out their information so marketing databases can be populated without actually sending out any of the items in question except to high profile social media personalities who contribute to the marketing hype while regular people see nothing.

[Zenith]

I mentioned Johns Radio a few days ago. Purely by coincidence I was looking at an archive disk today and came across the catalog for the "closing down" sale in 2002. John was not happy with the result and claimed that the buyers had conspired to keep prices low. No such thing happened. The auction was poorly promoted, the catalog came out far too late, had no photos and lots of errors. On the day of sale lot numbers had changed and items moved. A Saturday was odd for a trade sale too. About 2300 lots and a 10AM start meant less than 15 seconds per lot with no breaks. Bids were very low. I'm not a dealer and was avoiding "boat anchors" but had to stop bidding when I reckoned my small van was full. I still had cash left.
Also of note thet it was all stuff from Smithies Mill not the "good" kit in the Whitehall Road works.

Johns Radio is a rave from the grave. As I recall I phoned them around 2003 to ask if they had a Marconi TF1014 ultra low distortion oscillator. They'd just closed down and I was told that they might well have had one but if so, it would be in the skips into which they had dumped a lot of their stock. He seemed very pissed off about the amount of good stuff which he had chucked out. Since it was a very long trip, and I suspected the skips would have been picked clean by canny locals, I didn't bother.

Another one in roughly that neck of the woods was M&B Radio. I think I bought an RA17 from them.

There were a few companies selling used TE which advertised in WW at the time. A few are still going but offering a much reduced range.

Did anyone visit Centre Electronics in Birmingham? Not exactly a TE dealer but he did have a few items of interest. The shop was an electronic junk shop. Howard Turner used to have a stall at the bigger rallies and was a regular at Newbury. A part of his business was selling Sovtek valves and he advertised in some of the music magazines. I bought an AR88LF from there.