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

[BU508A]

Still alive. Currently shitting near Husavik.

PXL_20230814_170127003.jpg

Nice landscape photo from yesterday's hike

Enjoy!

And here is a little advice:
Q: What do you do when you can't see the forest for the trees in Iceland?

A: Get up.

[bd139]

Hahaha

Back in UK now. I will leave this wonderful find here for now, discovered in a shop in Reykjavik ...

PXL_20230816_221325073~2.jpg

[MED6753]

Hahaha

Back in UK now. I will leave this wonderful find here for now, discovered in a shop in Reykjavik ...

PXL_20230816_221325073~2.jpg

Maybe I could use it as a replacement for one of the HV transformers in the Type 547 scopes.

[25 CPS]

There's still a couple of chores that I need to take care of, mainly doing a short grocery shop and then cook when I get back home, so I'm not making any promises but if I can squeeze it into the next five hours before midnight local time comes, maybe, just maybe we might have some Fluke Friday.

[25 CPS]

I guess it didn't happen. I ran out of steam and needed to get to bed for work this morning. Maybe when I get home depending on how the evening shapes up. I did pick up a new piece of Fluke equipment on Wednesday but haven't had a chance to sit down with it yet.

[mnementh]

Yeah... similar here. I've been polluting the Discord with watch tinkery madness, as I've been high on cough syrup and borderline hypoxic with some flu bug in my chest for the last few days.

Today I rolled out of bed at the crack of noon and attacked the front yard... well, I did aboot half my normal part of the job and let the boi take up the slack. Now I can barely sit upright to type; my ass keeps caving in.

mnem

[25 CPS]

Yeah... similar here. I've been polluting the Discord with watch tinkery madness, as I've been high on cough syrup and borderline hypoxic with some flu bug in my chest for the last few days.

Today I rolled out of bed at the crack of noon and attacked the front yard... well, I did aboot half my normal part of the job and let the boi take up the slack. Now I can barely sit upright to type; my ass keeps caving in.

mnem

For me, it was the back yard that took up most of the two days off I had. Everything's kept growing with all the rain we've had instead of slowing down so between mowing the lawn front and back on Thursday plus most of the day with the hedge clippers yesterday in the back yard, and I have 10 yard waste bags sitting in the driveway waiting to go out. Add a few other errands and the two days off I had vanished quickly. I chatted with the outgoing midnight guy when I got into work this morning for a few minutes and we were both groaning about how two days off isn't enough between monster shift rotations.

[mansaxel]

Had old friends over for dinner yesterday -- they live in San Francisco, but are visiting and we wanted to meet. I went and visited them this spring, so now we've met twice in a year, which hasn't happened since dunno when. Anyway, that meant cleaning the entire house, which was sorely needed, and also multiple trips to the recycling yard. Today, I'm going to correct a sheepish measurement error in installing plumbing for low pressure air in the garage which will mean pipe cutter and threading tools, swearing and hard work, and then, since it's the last weekend of the summer school vacations, we're going out for dinner tonight.

I'm waiting for a shipment of cable and connectors for my mains distro project, and once that arrives, will lace a loom and install it.

Test equipment usage this weekend: Very little.

[Specmaster]

Had old friends over for dinner yesterday -- they live in San Francisco, but are visiting and we wanted to meet. I went and visited them this spring, so now we've met twice in a year, which hasn't happened since dunno when. Anyway, that meant cleaning the entire house, which was sorely needed, and also multiple trips to the recycling yard. Today, I'm going to correct a sheepish measurement error in installing plumbing for low pressure air in the garage which will mean pipe cutter and threading tools, swearing and hard work, and then, since it's the last weekend of the summer school vacations, we're going out for dinner tonight.

I'm waiting for a shipment of cable and connectors for my mains distro project, and once that arrives, will lace a loom and install it.

Test equipment usage this weekend: Very little.

My council is now insisting on people having to make an online booking for the recycling centre, no booking, no tipping. That kind of makes off the cuff trips to the centre a no no these days. Surely that's how most people dump their rubbish when having a clear out, it tends to be something that most folk do on the spur of the moment thing

[tggzzz]

Had old friends over for dinner yesterday -- they live in San Francisco, but are visiting and we wanted to meet. I went and visited them this spring, so now we've met twice in a year, which hasn't happened since dunno when. Anyway, that meant cleaning the entire house, which was sorely needed, and also multiple trips to the recycling yard. Today, I'm going to correct a sheepish measurement error in installing plumbing for low pressure air in the garage which will mean pipe cutter and threading tools, swearing and hard work, and then, since it's the last weekend of the summer school vacations, we're going out for dinner tonight.

I'm waiting for a shipment of cable and connectors for my mains distro project, and once that arrives, will lace a loom and install it.

Test equipment usage this weekend: Very little.

My council is now insisting on people having to make an online booking for the recycling centre, no booking, no tipping. That kind of makes off the cuff trips to the centre a no no these days. Surely that's how most people dump their rubbish when having a clear out, it tends to be something that most folk do on the spur of the moment thing

Same here.

Plus you have to go to a tip in "your" council, not the nearest nor most convenient one. Understandable, but it can mean longer trips which aren't combined with other business.

But that will all pale into insignificance when the "black bin" frequency is further reduced. Based on my mother's experience, her bin will be overflowing with nappies before it is (not) collected. I believe councils are muttering about special collections for such registered people. Firstly the public demonstration that "elderly dirty old woman lives here" would humiliate them. Secondly the chances of all the special trips to collect nappies happening every time on time seems to be remote.

[Specmaster]

Had old friends over for dinner yesterday -- they live in San Francisco, but are visiting and we wanted to meet. I went and visited them this spring, so now we've met twice in a year, which hasn't happened since dunno when. Anyway, that meant cleaning the entire house, which was sorely needed, and also multiple trips to the recycling yard. Today, I'm going to correct a sheepish measurement error in installing plumbing for low pressure air in the garage which will mean pipe cutter and threading tools, swearing and hard work, and then, since it's the last weekend of the summer school vacations, we're going out for dinner tonight.

I'm waiting for a shipment of cable and connectors for my mains distro project, and once that arrives, will lace a loom and install it.

Test equipment usage this weekend: Very little.

My council is now insisting on people having to make an online booking for the recycling centre, no booking, no tipping. That kind of makes off the cuff trips to the centre a no no these days. Surely that's how most people dump their rubbish when having a clear out, it tends to be something that most folk do on the spur of the moment thing

Same here.

Plus you have to go to a tip in "your" council, not the nearest nor most convenient one. Understandable, but it can mean longer trips which aren't combined with other business.

But that will all pale into insignificance when the "black bin" frequency is further reduced. Based on my mother's experience, her bin will be overflowing with nappies before it is (not) collected. I believe councils are muttering about special collections for such registered people. Firstly the public demonstration that "elderly dirty old woman lives here" would humiliate them. Secondly the chances of all the special trips to collect nappies happening every time on time seems to be remote.

There are rumours around here that the councils are planning on charging people to empty their black bins as well as the brown bins, it is rapidly becoming one big money grab. As if we don't already pay enough in the way of rates.

[tggzzz]

My council is now insisting on people having to make an online booking for the recycling centre, no booking, no tipping. That kind of makes off the cuff trips to the centre a no no these days. Surely that's how most people dump their rubbish when having a clear out, it tends to be something that most folk do on the spur of the moment thing

Same here.

Plus you have to go to a tip in "your" council, not the nearest nor most convenient one. Understandable, but it can mean longer trips which aren't combined with other business.

But that will all pale into insignificance when the "black bin" frequency is further reduced. Based on my mother's experience, her bin will be overflowing with nappies before it is (not) collected. I believe councils are muttering about special collections for such registered people. Firstly the public demonstration that "elderly dirty old woman lives here" would humiliate them. Secondly the chances of all the special trips to collect nappies happening every time on time seems to be remote.

There are rumours around here that the councils are planning on charging people to empty their black bins as well as the brown bins, it is rapidly becoming one big money grab. As if we don't already pay enough in the way of rates.

I would ignore rumours: there are too many people Out There that get their jollies from plucking stuff out of thin air - or, for the conspiracy minded, because Putin et al wants to sow discord.

Apart from that, the money has to come from somewhere, and in the end that will be from subjects either directly through local taxation or indirectly through national taxation.

[bd139]

Living in a civilised area of the UK, we already have bi-weekly bin collections and have to book the tip. What it's really like...

1. You never have to queue for 2 fucking hours in the middle of an industrial estate when you take your stuff to the tip now. It's straight in, dump it off and get going. That Sunday morning shit show is now gone forever. Woohoo. If you can't plan something or book something the next day, you are incompetent.

2. I never managed to fill a black bin at all because quite frankly most of it went in the recycling boxes. The cardboard box is still taken away if there is a vertical column 6 foot tall of cardboard hanging out.

3. I had to pay £30 a year for garden waste disposal. This is a fucking bargain because they take 26 HUGE bins worth of rubbish away. And if you don't have a garden, like I don't now, I don't pay for it.

As for the nappies, those things are literally a shit show figuratively and literally. And no I'm not suggesting use of reusable ones - those are disgusting.

Black bin collection is covered under the council tax mandate. That can't be charged on top AFAIK legally.

Really we need to stop generating so much trash rather than complaining we can't get rid of it conveniently.

[tggzzz]

Living in a civilised area of the UK, we already have bi-weekly bin collections and have to book the tip. What it's really like...

1. You never have to queue for 2 fucking hours in the middle of an industrial estate when you take your stuff to the tip now. It's straight in, dump it off and get going. That Sunday morning shit show is now gone forever. Woohoo. If you can't plan something or book something the next day, you are incompetent.

I have sympathy with that.

2. I never managed to fill a black bin at all because quite frankly most of it went in the recycling boxes. The cardboard box is still taken away if there is a vertical column 6 foot tall of cardboard hanging out.

3. I had to pay £30 a year for garden waste disposal. This is a fucking bargain because they take 26 HUGE bins worth of rubbish away. And if you don't have a garden, like I don't now, I don't pay for it.

A chipper plus compost heap plus the occasional bootful of branches means I don't pay for garden waste disposal

As for the nappies, those things are literally a shit show figuratively and literally. And no I'm not suggesting use of reusable ones - those are disgusting.

Actually nappies are easier to transport than kitchen waste, since everything is absorbed - whereas kitchen waste drips.

My mother couldn't have lifted them into the black bin, let alone got the black bin into the road, and as for taking them to the tip herself - not for the last 15 years of her life.

Nappies are the killer[1] USP for black bins; I think councils are recognising that; I've never seen them argue against it.

[1] possibly literally for the elderly who are living alone

Black bin collection is covered under the council tax mandate. That can't be charged on top AFAIK legally.

Really we need to stop generating so much trash rather than complaining we can't get rid of it conveniently.

Avoidance is undoubtedly the best technique; that's what I taught my daughter.

Unfortunately I don't think there are any regulations for the frequency of the black bin collections. Certainly my council and the local city's council have floated moving to 3 weekly collections.

My council also announced the closure of the nearest tip, which would have meant the tips would have been 20 miles round trip (some days), otherwise a 40 mile round trip.

And they wonder why flytipping is increasing

[25 CPS]

I guess I'll do it here since Fluke Friday is three days ago now.

I've been preparing equipment to take to an off-site work assignment involving AC power quality troubleshooting. It's well out of mandate so I'm going to be using my own equipment for this which is why some of my portable stuff has been brought into work and checked out ahead of travel. The kit I was originally contemplating taking last week was my Fluke 190-204 Scopemeter with a couple of i1010 current clamps and a pair of multimeters so I started testing the specific setup I was thinking about with the Scopemeter:







The test jig is a totally dead Apple laptop plugged into a line splitter with the i1010 clamped on it feeding channel 2 (blue trace) to give a current waveform with the somewhat sinusoidal voltage waveform taken off the line splitter's volt check sockets feeding channel 1 (red trace). The second i1010 and another line splitter and set of multimeter probes and the adapters to get everything connected to the channel 3 and 4 BNC terminals would provide another pair of voltage and current waveform monitoring.

The laptop being charged from stone cold totally dead provided a nasty looking non-linear current waveform showing a very narrow conduction angle until the laptop charged up enough that the power management system on it came to life and it was able to make better use of more of the AC voltage cycle. I can post pictures of that if anyone wants.



Also in the kit is my Agilent U12412A multimeter selected because it has the harmonic ratio function plus the Keysight U1252B (not shown).

Meanwhile, locally on Facebook Marketplace, there was another piece of Fluke equipment that had been tempting me. The listing had been up for a while and was getting no takers despite being more than reasonably priced and I'd been on the fence about it. The work assignment coming up made me get off the fence and arrange to pick it up because it dovetails with what I'll be doing exactly and the overtime from the travel will more than pay for it. Fluke 41B Power Harmonic Analyzer:



I set up the same test jig at work using another totally stone cold dead Apple laptop as a dummy load in order to have another nasty current waveform and associated harmonic content to test with.















Lastly, the nasty current waveform, same as the Scopemeter showed. Calling this machine a Power Harmonic Analyzer is an understatement because it's measurement capability is quite comprehensive. The only thing it won't do is realtime three phase measurements. According to the manual, it does have the ability to do three phase work by measuring each phase individually and internally tabulating the data and the LCD display does have symbols to indicate that functionality being used.

This is far better than the Scopemeter showing voltage and current waveforms superimposed. Also, when I was test packing stuff for the trip, the Fluke 190-204 in its hard case with everything was too large and heavy to be practical so I struck it from the packing list given the newly acquired 41B. I didn't want to bring the 190-204 loose outside of its hard case because it's in excellent condition and I don't want to damage it so I prepared the Agilent U1620A instead:



I settled on the U1620A instead of the U1602A which is even smaller because for live power work, I want the fully isolated inputs. On the U1602A scope, the reference is common to both channels which could result in an ugly accidental short circuit which I'd rather rule out by having fully isolated inputs. Losing a pair of channels isn't that big of an issue to me since I've got the Fluke 41B now. The test equipment going on the trip is The Fluke 41B, Agilent U1242A, Agilent U1620A, Keysight U1252B, plus the various leads, current clamps, and adapters for them along with a very pared down basic set of hand tools.

[mansaxel]

Living in a civilised area of the UK, we already have bi-weekly bin collections and have to book the tip. What it's really like...

1. You never have to queue for 2 fucking hours in the middle of an industrial estate when you take your stuff to the tip now. It's straight in, dump it off and get going. That Sunday morning shit show is now gone forever. Woohoo. If you can't plan something or book something the next day, you are incompetent.

We still have the shitshow, but it is reasonably well managed unless you come like 20 minutes before closing on weekends. And some of the things they take really are nasty, like used motor oil.

2. I never managed to fill a black bin at all because quite frankly most of it went in the recycling boxes. The cardboard box is still taken away if there is a vertical column 6 foot tall of cardboard hanging out.

We're at 4 weeks between emptyings of a 140 l bin. This works out well except just right now; we had some large things that needed to be binned there, and we did it at an inconvenient time, so we're going to try asking the neighbours who usually have extra capacity.

Really we need to stop generating so much trash rather than complaining we can't get rid of it conveniently.

This, really this. We recycle very carefully, which is how we manage on 35l per week most of the time, and most of the weight and volume is compost which goes in special biodegradable plastic bags that are sorted separately and used for large scale fart production. And that's with 5 people and a cat.

[mansaxel]

Today, I'm going to correct a sheepish measurement error in installing plumbing for low pressure air in the garage which will mean pipe cutter and threading tools, swearing and hard work.

And here, the process of fixing a 65mm measurement error:

1. Remove the evidence..
   
2. Cut the thread, with lots of oil and swearing:
   
3. British Standard Pipe, Tapered:
   
4. Apply flax and goo,
   
   
   on the pipe:
   
5. Screw on, and tighten:
   
6. Finished result, ready for mounting on the wall:
   

[Cubdriver]

Lastly, the nasty current waveform, same as the Scopemeter showed. Calling this machine a Power Harmonic Analyzer is an understatement because it's measurement capability is quite comprehensive. The only thing it won't do is realtime three phase measurements. According to the manual, it does have the ability to do three phase work by measuring each phase individually and internally tabulating the data and the LCD display does have symbols to indicate that functionality being used.

This is far better than the Scopemeter showing voltage and current waveforms superimposed. Also, when I was test packing stuff for the trip, the Fluke 190-204 in its hard case with everything was too large and heavy to be practical so I struck it from the packing list given the newly acquired 41B. I didn't want to bring the 190-204 loose outside of its hard case because it's in excellent condition and I don't want to damage it so I prepared the Agilent U1620A instead:

Dammit!!!! I just cleared the Fluke D802 from my watchlist; now you've given me something else to be on the lookout for. <facepalm>

One step forward, two steps back...

-Pat

[Specmaster]

I would ignore rumours: there are too many people Out There that get their jollies from plucking stuff out of thin air - or, for the conspiracy minded, because Putin et al wants to sow discord.

Apart from that, the money has to come from somewhere, and in the end that will be from subjects either directly through local taxation or indirectly through national taxation.

You know my dear old late Dad used to say that that one day they will find a way of charging us for the air that we breathe and this was one of his favourite songs and at the time I was only a young whipper-snapper but as I get older I'm beginning to see my Dads point of view and can already see how many things he used to tell me are in a way coming partly true, but I'll not over that again, but this was his favourite song, he said it summed up the average working man's lot in life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh0QiX ... ndonDeCamp

[bd139]

You're just getting old and shitty. Happens to all of us

[Specmaster]

You're just getting old and shitty. Happens to all of us

You'll get there soon enough

[vk6zgo]

You're just getting old and shitty. Happens to all of us

And it really sucks!

[tautech]

You're just getting old and shitty. Happens to all of us

And it really sucks!

Except when some stranger offers to buy you a beer.
Hang in there Bryan, Xmas gets closer every day.

[vk6zgo]

You're just getting old and shitty. Happens to all of us

And it really sucks!

Except when some stranger offers to buy you a beer.
Hang in there Bryan, Xmas gets closer every day.

But then, Rob, you're hardly a "stranger" any more!

[tautech]

And it really sucks!

Except when some stranger offers to buy you a beer.
Hang in there Bryan, Xmas gets closer every day.

But then, Rob, you're hardly a "stranger" any more!

I’m quite sure if we tripped over one another neither would recognise each other at this time but can’t wait for that to change when Al, you and I all get together.
We should have a firm idea of itinerary by the 2nd week of Dec then make a plan for the catchup.