Wife introduced kitchen work surfaces (Kuechenarbeitsplatte). Cheap, can be had at home improvement store, works well here.


Tam

With best regards
Tam HANNA

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On 2020. 04. 25. 7:50, John Parkins G8KVP wrote:

Hello Dave,

No nothing bad at all, just making it more difficult for ourselves.

When we moved house I took over a room for my gear, so I was able to
build benches, shelves etc as I wanted them. At first it was fine, but
I think as we all do a flat surface is for putting things on. So the
amount of available work area reduces and reduces until we're trying
to work on a large bit of gear in a space which isn't quite big
enough...... I've over come this by having a removable 'bench' which
is only put into place when I need the extra room and removed
afterwards. If it were left in place it would end up covered in stuff!
We can't help it, I think it's in all our natures to collect.

Friday, April 24, 2020, 6:53:46 PM, you wrote:

DM> On 4/24/20 12:27 PM, John Parkins G8KVP wrote:

WORKBENCH! How ever wide you make them they just aren't wide enough.

DM> Unfinished flat doors make very good workbenches. And desks, for that
DM> matter.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

DM> You say this as if there's something bad about it.

DM> -Dave

Somebody asked me what does Option C61 stand for in HP 3400A RMS voltmeter.

I can't remember, but I think it was something immaterial - like certification supplied or on-site service options.

Does anybody know? Please feel free to reply to that question directly if you wish.

Cheers
Leo

?

Hi,

I used Chipquick to remove a broken ADC from my TDS540B acquisition board and from a donor board.
Worked great.

I added Chipquick to all the joints and heated the whole chip using hot air to remove it.
Afterwards I cleaned the soldering pads using a normal iron and flux.

Putting the donor part back was done using a normal, small flat soldering iron.

Pictures can be found here:

/g/TekScopes/album?id=21745

Back in the day when I was still working for GM many of us took note of
the fact that we were disparaged as "rust belt industries" while the
computer weenies in the silicon valley basked in the Sun and their own
self promotion.? One of my coworkers pointed out that we had been
manufacturing computer systems for years that would faultlessly run a
vehicle for ten years and 100,000 miles. He pointed out that if we were
as great as the weenies our cars would crap out 3 or 4 times a day in
traffic, show a blue screen and tell us to reboot!

Jack Reynolds

On 4/26/2020 9:31 AM, Harvey White wrote:

see below....

On 4/26/2020 4:08 AM, Anders wrote:

Case in point: Windows 10 comes with Candy Crush.. Why?

Because there are people who use their computers/laptops to play
games, and it's easy to pull that up, give the six year old the
laptop, and go about your business.

MIcrosoft's philosophy is to try to be everything to everybody at all
times (and then, one day, charge them per use).

What you're looking for, driving down the road, is a good dependable
car that does what you want and not a lot more.? A car designed by
microsoft would have a living room, recliners, game room, media room,
small kitchen, 2 baths, and a library. It would be so tall it would
fall over periodically, you'd have to stop every 10 miles and then
turn it off, run around the outside, turn it back on, and then you'd
be good for another 10 miles.? Every alternate Tuesday, you'd have the
dealer come find you and bolt on the latest accessory and remove the
ones you've been used to.

see below....

On 4/26/2020 4:08 AM, Anders wrote:

Case in point: Windows 10 comes with Candy Crush.. Why?

Because there are people who use their computers/laptops to play games, and it's easy to pull that up, give the six year old the laptop, and go about your business.?

MIcrosoft's philosophy is to try to be everything to everybody at all times (and then, one day, charge them per use).?

What you're looking for, driving down the road, is a good dependable car that does what you want and not a lot more.? A car designed by microsoft would have a living room, recliners, game room, media room, small kitchen, 2 baths, and a library.? It would be so tall it would fall over periodically, you'd have to stop every 10 miles and then turn it off, run around the outside, turn it back on, and then you'd be good for another 10 miles.? Every alternate Tuesday, you'd have the dealer come find you and bolt on the latest accessory and remove the ones you've been used to.

First the dat hold and the other one(I forget what it’s called) are actually controlled by the computer. ?At least under TODS and the 9500D software we use.

I will keep looking for one of our old manuals but it sounds like there could be an issue in the decade counters. ?As I remember the 2nd board (not NIXIE board is mostly to do with the time mark outputs rather than the clock it self. I think basically you have the NIXIE drivers fed by Latch’s fed by counters that do the Seconds ?0->9 and 0>5 before kicking up to the minuets 0->9 and 0>5 etc

Again this is all from memory. I also haven’t been able to find our old boards I fear they are buried in 800 pounds of gold scrap.

I’ll keep looking

Regards,

?

Stephen Hanselman

Datagate Systems, LLC

On Apr 22, 2020, at 14:01, Philipp G <phili.g@...> wrote:

?

Hello, Steve,

depending on how I change the ICs the clock seems to run or not. What I couldn't get away from is that some numbers are skipped when setting the clock. This is annoying if you jump from min 58 to 60 then the minutes do not fit anymore. Much more strange is that the display Data Hold does not go off when the clock is running and also no matter if the clock is running and has a plausible time or not always a time error is displayed. If I remove the J-K flip-flop on the PCB these two indicators are off. The device seems to be intact but I had exchanged it for an identical one. I would exchange the other devices if HP had not used Inverse Logic devices for the counters. Or is there a cheap replacement for 1820-0119 and 1820-0116?
I would hate to build my own replacement for that...
Due to the inverse logic and the speed, the devices cannot be tested on my current IC Tester... I suppose that the tester can check HC and LS devices, so it has something to do with speed? Or what is the reason that SN74xx devices can not be tested with most IC testers that are available at eBay.

Many greetings from Germany

Philipp

Am 21.04.2020 um 18:43 schrieb Stephen Hanselman:

Philipp,

?

What is the clock doing/not doing.? I went looking for our manuals and it seems they did not survive the purge.

?

One thing to do as a preventative measure is to look at the row of chips next to the NIXIE tubes.? In between them (I think I’ve got the position right) are resistors.? These are the current limit resistors for the NIXIEs and they get hot enough to burn the board.? We always replace them, installing about a 0.25 in above the PCA.?

?

The circuit for this part is very similar to the display section of the 5327B.?

?

We built a replacement clock that actually remembers who it is when the power is cycled so all of the old stuff got packed.

?

I’ll talk to my partner but I can’t find the spare boards of manuals we used to have

?

Steve

?

From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Philipp G
Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2020 1:57 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [HP-Agilent-Keysight-equipment] HP K21-5321B Digital Clock

?

Hello,

maybe anybody has a service Manual für the K21-5321B Digital Clock.

My clock dosent work the right way. I already tryed swaping ICs but i think that more than one is faulty...

Best regards from Germany

Philipp Gr?mer

Bill,

I agree with soooo much of what you said, thank you.?

As to scopes it was my understanding Tek had a patent on their circuit and didn’t license it. ?We had tek scope in the EM shop at Opto div. ?

Regards,

?

Stephen Hanselman

Datagate Systems, LLC

On Apr 25, 2020, at 13:43, Bill E <solartron@...> wrote:

?This topic has sure mutated. Can't let it die now, I'll jump in with a bunch of random babbling, some I've done before, but hey, can't remember which topics. Senility, I suppose.

I posted a few days ago how horrible Win-based equipment was. Just what was anyone thinking? Maybe HP did get paid off my MS. XP was pretty atrocious, massively buggy, security issues all over the place. Both HP and Tek did good embedded sw, then went lame. OTOH, could be part of that move to outsource development, driven by clueless bean-counters. I transitioned from all HW to mostly all SW over my career, always fighting the 'we can hire 5 3rd-world devs for what we pay you'. Ok, do that, hmm, nothing works. So, still pay a real dev plus those 5 useless hacks. Bean-counters apparently can't figure out that they're paying 2x one good dev for 0.9 total output, since all the code has to be dealt with (rewritten) by the good dev.

Next rant, sw bloat. I ended up doing a lot of sw for telecom, massive servers, all in Java. Talk about bloated code, gigs of open-source libs, some dragged in just to get one trivial method. And, modern pseudo-devs have no understanding of hardware at all, and just as little understanding of basic sw algorithms, Just blindly use whatever they stumble across, then wonder why we needed a server farm to run what should have been possible on one machine.

Moving on, those DS 'top-hat' pseudo-nvrams. Who ever thought those were a good idea? 10 yrs, dead. I'm suspecting bean-counters again, make sure to obsolete the equipment. There's a guy selling ferromagnetic rams to replace said DS horrors for Tek scopes. Time to start doing the same for our HP stuff. And yes, my latest acquisition, 53310A, appears to have one of those damn things in it.

Have I run out? Of course not.

On to C vs C++. I really never liked C++, and don't get me started on C#. My definition of C++, a pseudo-OO variant done by someone that really didn't understand C. Stroustrup is on my hate-list. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of C, and still my favorite lang for embedded tiny stuff. I started with IBM 360 assembler (BALR sound familiar, waiting for responses to that), then Fortran, then PDP-8, PDP-11, Multics, Unix, Linux. Used Unix at Bell Labs early on. It is truly amazing how it has evolved.

Hmm, any more? Oh, wait, of course.....

Cheap instruments from China. All based on various US highly-integrated chips. Some of the stuff is useful. most is just junk. Amazing 'specs' in the ads. Any real test data? Of course not. Get some of them, Ok, yes, they do the basic operations, but, example, cheap signal generators, horrible purity and stability. About as much out-of-peak energy as is in the fundamental.

Finally, modern instruments of any kind.

What happened to the great engineering we used to have? Now it's all about design-to-cost. Selling points seem to be 'internet connected'. I'll stack my $300 5370 time-interval analyzer up against anything you can get today. GUI? Nope. Internet? Nope. Amazing? Yes. Same for my 54542, and still amazing even today, given what one costs vs new junk. BTW, friend of mine from college worked at HP instrument division, he's told me many a sad tale about the decline of HP. Blames one person, Carly.

In closing, maybe I can start another flame war. My 54542 is the first HP scope I'd ever considered.Everything else I now have in my home lab is HP, but Tek? scopes really dominated. I love my Tek 2465A, one of the last great analog scopes. My HP friend said they got tired of everyone complaining about the lame triggering performance of HP scopes, decided to do a 'Tek killer', and succeeded. True? Don't know. I do know that one of the early Tek digital scopes that I had used this what seems to me to be a total hack, linear CCD to capture the analog, then read it out slowly enough for the lame A/D to handle. And, I do know I just love my 54542. Well, until the already-fading CRT dies. At least it doesn't run Win. :)

Hope I've amused you,
Bill

Oh, and I want to put a plug in for some of the classic Brit engineering. My 2 Datron 4910 voltage refs used to be national-standard level. My Solartron 7081 8.5 digit meters rock (although it is sloooow at 8.5, and really isn't quite as good as a 3458A, but at a fraction of the price if you can find one. BTW, it didn't use the LTZ ref both the 3458 and my Datron 4910's used. It had a 'zero-temp-factor' Zener, selected, and then compensated more by a temp measurement, trimmed per-Zener to get the best zero TC. Love it.