Test Equipment Anonymous

Guess it's time to dust off This Old Chestnut:



This old Chestnut... By mnem

Chestnuts roasting on an open Tek scope;
Jacks and plugs aligned in rows...
Yuletide songs played on tube amplifiers,
And folks warming their hands by the triodes' glow.

Every TEA'er knows... a little extra grid bias and a heated cathode,
Help to make their nixies bright.
EEs and HAMs with their benches all aglow,
Will find it hard to flip that breaker tonight.

They know the carrier's on his way;
He's loaded all kinds of scopes and meters and maybe a 2-way.
And every nerdling's child is going to spy,
To see if a therumin can really make you fly.

And so I'll offer to tune the phase;
on antennas from one to ninety-two...
Although it's been tuned, many times, many ways,
There's no such thing as just right, even when it's Christmas, at two...

Merry Christmas all you maniacs, and may your God go with you!

mnem

Specmaster wrote: ↑Wed Dec 17, 2025 4:17 pm Just to prove that I'm alive and kicking, as Paul said, I've had a rather busy time of late with real life getting in the way of hobbies, hope to be back to normal soon and completing the items that I started posting about and never came back with updates etc.

Xmas one and all.jpg

Sorry for not responding sooner... I was busy having seizures from that Xmas card pic.

mnem

Bit further down the photography rabbit hole. We like rabbit holes here don't we?

Way too much eBay later we have .... a Durst 305 and a pile of chemicals and widgets.


Followed by a back ache and some swearing ....

Takes me back 50 years when I used the one in the big cupboard at the back of the 6th form physics lab. Never done it since.

On the floor in that cupboard there were some naked PCBs containing resistors capacitors and transistors. Teachers were quite happy for me to desolder and use the components.

About the only thing they kept under lock and key was the radioactive sources. But my friend had an old fob watch that was more radioactive. It was sent to Harwell to be destroyed

Happy daze

bd139 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 23, 2025 7:53 pm Bit further down the photography rabbit hole. We like rabbit holes here don't we?

Yes, but there are some rabbit holes I am happy to enjoy vicariously. Calculators are onesuch. Each to his own. I assume you are getting into colour printing.

Amateur colour printing was always something of a step too far. In the 80s I was talking to a chap I was at school with who'd used a friend's darkroom with colour enlarger to produce a large colour print of a photo he particularly valued. It took about four hours and the cost was exorbitant, but the result was magnificent. He said he wouldn't do it again.

Film photography has much to be said for it, but I don't miss it.

Colour photographs are notoriously temperature etc sensitive.

I never dared develop b&w negative film; strictly printing.

Bugger colour dev and printing. I have 3 rolls of Kodak Gold 200 turning up tomorrow. I plan to blow one in the next month (after the roll of HP5 in the body) and get it developed locally. Then throw the other two at Berlin in March. I have a place lined up who will process it there already. No prints.

I will scan when I get it home with this contraption...


Edit: it does a fairly decent job (well that plus Lightroom):

tggzzz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 23, 2025 8:23 pm But my friend had an old fob watch that was more radioactive. It was sent to Harwell to be destroyed

To be added to low-level waste. There have been many accidents with low-level radioactivity. The women who painted luminous numerals on WW2 aircraft instruments used to lick their brushes to get an accurate tip for painting; some lost their jaws as a consequence. Nasty. I used to have a Trimphone with a luminous dial (tritium plus fluorescent material). Apparently, cinema emergency exit signs also used tritium.

bd139 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 24, 2025 12:03 am Bugger colour dev and printing. I have 3 rolls of Kodak Gold 200 turning up tomorrow. I plan to blow one in the next month (after the roll of HP5 in the body) and get it developed locally. Then throw the other two at Berlin in March. I have a place lined up who will process it there already. No prints.

Ah good! I was beginning to think you were indeed venturing not into a rabbit hole, but something like the Labyrinth at Crete, where you'd come across the Minataur. You may not have Theseus' readiness of resource........

B&W dev and printing isn't a rabbit hole, it's a charming eccentricity. Not much different to liking your toast done on one side.

tggzzz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 23, 2025 11:49 pm Colour photographs are notoriously temperature etc sensitive.

I never dared develop b&w negative film; strictly printing.

Yes, about +/- 0.25C, so accurate thermometers and a proper water bath. If you got it wrong, everything came out with a caste. This could be anything from everything coming out like a Canneletto to viewing things through a strange green filter. Also the chemicals didn't last long. I saw concertina bottles so you compress them and leave no air space giving the chemicals a longer life. Colour printing was a whole other departure, OK if it was a full time job

I came across people developing their own transparencies. You could buy film in bulk and put it into a loader, then load your own cassettes. There were development tanks taking 6 x 36 exposure lengths and kits of chemicals. When the chemical processing was done, you'd still have the job of mounting the shots in slide frames. There was probably a contraption to make it easier, at extra cost and finding somewhere to keep it.

On the other hand you could just buy a cassette of slide film with processing included, post it off when it was finished, and a week later a box of slides came in the post. I found 36 exposures took ages to get through. Getting through 6 of them would be an ordeal.

B&W 35mm developing wasn't that bad. There were light proof development tanks. You had to open the cassettes and load the spiral frames in the dark. Then put the frames into the tank and screw on the top. After that everything could be done in the light.

EC8010 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 24, 2025 11:55 am

tggzzz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 23, 2025 8:23 pm But my friend had an old fob watch that was more radioactive. It was sent to Harwell to be destroyed

To be added to low-level waste. There have been many accidents with low-level radioactivity. The women who painted luminous numerals on WW2 aircraft instruments used to lick their brushes to get an accurate tip for painting; some lost their jaws as a consequence. Nasty. I used to have a Trimphone with a luminous dial (tritium plus fluorescent material). Apparently, cinema emergency exit signs also used tritium.

Then there was the Radium Fad. When radium was discovered it was hailed as this wonder substance with magical properties, so all sorts of products were sold as "radium". Most of them contained no radium, because it was expensive. I saw Radium shoe polish in the 60s. Some of them did contain radium and were expensive. Hence the tragic story of Eben Byers, a millionaire who was an enthusiastic consumer of RadiThor, a quack cure-all.

https://medium.com/the-mission/a-deep-d ... 81062c918c

Further down there's a link to an article on The Radium Girls.

I'm sure New Scientist did an article on Eben Byers in the 70s. It included a picture of his skull taken in the dark.

And do look up "Doramad" (radioactive toothpaste). There were also radioactive suppositories sold to improve a man's "vigour". Quite the reverse.

EC8010 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 24, 2025 6:15 pm And do look up "Doramad" (radioactive toothpaste). There were also radioactive suppositories sold to improve a man's "vigour". Quite the reverse.

They'd put lead in your pencil. At least they'd decay to it eventually.

I did look up "Doramad". Thorium based apparently. I came across The Museum of Radium

http://museumofradium.co.uk/

The stuff I came across as a kid wasn't shoe polish, it was a suede die.

http://museumofradium.co.uk/radium-suede-dye/

I doubt it contained any radium.

Thoriated TIG electrodes are now deprecated. At one time thorium was used in gas mantles which were pretty much ubiquitous.

I suppose a similar thing is asbestos, once hailed as a wonder and used for all sorts of things. Now carefully regulated and to be carefully disposed of. When I was a teenager there was a chemistry practical where we put a few scoopfuls of potassium chlorate in a test tube, then a wad of asbestos wool, then some metal powder, then another wad of asbestos wool. We heated the metal part in a Bunsen flame then heated the potassium chlorate. With magnesium powder there was a whoomph, and the wad was blown out. Aluminium melted the test tube.

bd139 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 24, 2025 12:03 am Bugger colour dev and printing. I have 3 rolls of Kodak Gold 200 turning up tomorrow. I plan to blow one in the next month (after the roll of HP5 in the body) and get it developed locally. Then throw the other two at Berlin in March. I have a place lined up who will process it there already. No prints.

I will scan when I get it home with this contraption...


IMG_2693.jpeg


Edit: it does a fairly decent job (well that plus Lightroom):


DSC_0182.jpg

Somewhere, I have a proper 35mm scanner, more than likely it is in the garage in a box or something, one day I'll dig it out and see if it still works.Never did my own developing or printing, but I much prefer modern digital photography and stick it through a digital editing package.

So far this season we've already had 4 small storms dropping an inch to 3 inches of snow. Then the following day the sun would come out with above freezing temps and melt it. But this looks like a big one.

Been a while since one of these has hit!

Cubdriver wrote: ↑Fri Dec 26, 2025 6:45 pm Been a while since one of these has hit!

Yea, at least 3 years if I recall correctly.

It started coming down here around 6:30ish; two hours later there's already a good 5" on the ground. Thankfully it's cold, so the snow for now at least is very light and fluffy.

<edit to add - it started around 6:30ish about 10 miles east of where I live as I was out shopping, and as storms usually travel west to east it may have begun a bit earlier here at my house - when I left BJ's in Waterbury CT it was snowing but with only a light dusting on the ground; by the time I'd made it to the west side of Waterbury about half way home there was at least a half inch and shortly thereafter I'd engaged the 4WD in the Jeep. In short, it's been coming down gangbusters!>

Not as much as predicted but still significant. For a period the snow mixed with sleet which cut down on the total accumulation. Tomorrow evening the temperature is going to rise around freezing and a period of freezing rain which should make for a real nice slippery mess.

Thaw freeze thaw freeze thaw is the usual state of affairs here. Doctors don't need to drum up business in that horrible weather

tggzzz wrote: ↑Sat Dec 27, 2025 2:26 pm Thaw freeze thaw freeze thaw is the usual state of affairs here. Doctors don't need to drum up business in that horrible weather

Correct. The flu is rampant this season.

It stayed cold here, so we got straight snow. Looks like 8~10" (20~25 cm) in these parts.




-Pat

I like to see snow fall and change everything. I like to see it on the ground and see little kids who've never seen it before play in it. Then after it's been there for no more than three days, melt and go away. None of the thaw freeze thaw freeze that tggzzz mentioned, with slush and refrozen treacherous slush. Then it's put in a credible appearance and done its job. We've really had a winter and it need trouble us no more for another twelve months.

Zenith wrote: ↑Sat Dec 27, 2025 8:16 pm I like to see snow fall and change everything. I like to see it on the ground and see little kids who've never seen it before play in it. Then after it's been there for no more than three days, melt and go away. None of the thaw freeze thaw freeze that tggzzz mentioned, with slush and refrozen treacherous slush. Then it's put in a credible appearance and done its job. We've really had a winter and it need trouble us no more for another twelve months.

I'm with you there - I don't ski, and it no longer gets me out of school, so I have almost no use for snow these days. Be pretty for a day or three, then melt already!!

-Pat

Zenith wrote: ↑Sat Dec 27, 2025 8:16 pm I like to see snow fall and change everything. I like to see it on the ground and see little kids who've never seen it before play in it. Then after it's been there for no more than three days, melt and go away. None of the thaw freeze thaw freeze that tggzzz mentioned, with slush and refrozen treacherous slush. Then it's put in a credible appearance and done its job. We've really had a winter and it need trouble us no more for another twelve months.

That about sums it up.

As long as the temperature stays below freezing, it doesn't feel so cold. Damp cold is less pleasant.

I remember, just, the infamous winter of '63. Definitely the winter of 81-82, since I had just moved into my first house that was heated by a coal fire - and the coal was frozen solid in the depot.

The winter of 2010 was also a narrow escape; I had just re-roofed my house, the contractors were cementing on the hip and ridge tiles, and I was using rain radar to tell them "the snow will be here in 30 minutes". It lasted 6 weeks, with this famous picture