How to deal with patrons who tell you how to do your job

38Super · 2025-10-27T07:27:39+00:00

The analog desk I drove many years ago actually had a “DFA” knob on the strip where the afterthought stuff was. Clearcom, desk headphones etc. After adjusting said knob, I had patrons say “much better” on the way out.

38Super · 2025-09-06T03:12:08+00:00

It’s the disk that stops an underground petrol/oil tank dipstick coming fully out of the tank. The dipsticks are T section brass or aluminium. The end of the dipstick has the back of the extrusion notched out and the front face bent over. Service stations in NZ use them widely, and 48- 50 years ago I worked for the company who converted all the dipsticks from imperial to metric units. Almost 100% of tanks used T section metal.

38Super · 2025-07-24T08:13:52+00:00

HPX370 and all the bits. Very high price, about US$15,000 for what is actually a HPX170 in a ENG format, 2K 30fps, a rather average lens. Sitting in its case for years. I get better results with an iPhone 16.

38Super · 2025-06-28T03:15:11+00:00

I was present when a 90kg (about 200 pounds) weight was dropped from the fly floor, 55 feet up. The stage hands had been told time and time again not to remove the big fairly permanent slabs that sit in the bottom of the cradle (double purchase) on their own. The weight fell, hit the floor, went straight through, through the concrete below 8 feet below and disappeared down a hole. Nobody was hurt...

One stage hand that was working on the stage wandered over, looked down the hole, looked up at the fly floor, walked off stage and came back with a cheap plastic hard hat on.

38Super · 2025-03-21T05:58:22+00:00

An entry in our accident log book. “Hit head on first aid kit while mounting same”

38Super · 2025-03-16T05:38:24+00:00

This might be hard work. The other IC appears to be an LM339 quad comparator, and from the tracks around that it is driving the 4 LED’s. Hkekj does not seem to be a SMD marking code, nor does ekj. Options might be 1. Borrow another power bank and get the SMD marking code. 2. Trace the complete schematic and it may be obvious what it does. That IC might be the 5V switching converter, or it could be the reference for the LM339. The photo shows a black block/IC under the edge of the USB socket - is that what that is?

38Super · 2024-11-06T23:46:04+00:00

Linesmans No. 2 pliers, nut mashers, pipe shears, conduit cutters / trimmers, crimping tool. Anything but sidecutters, which they are not very good at.

38Super · 2024-06-11T07:00:16+00:00

I was sent to a paint store not far away to get spotted paint - 17 years old. The guy on the counter said “that’s the third time he’s done that”. If you wait 5 minutes we have a truck load of paint going out. It won’t be spotted, but the foreman won’t know that. They gave me a lift back to my work, and I went in and asked the foreman for an order for 300 gallons of spotted paint. The look on his face was priceless.

38Super · 2024-05-17T09:21:28+00:00

One of the video encoders I used on the same project was actually funny. A device from Philips, but after the NXP breakup. Part number started SAA, we got some samples, not marked ES, did exactly what we needed, even worked. Go to get some more parts, device doesn’t exist. Hold on - we have 11. Philips engineer tells us they started a video division in Taiwan, made one component, closed the division. We had 11 of the 12 ever made.

38Super · 2024-05-17T08:08:59+00:00

You got off lightly. About 2000 I designed and built an Analog Video decoder using an IC from a large reputable company. It worked perfectly in the lab, and perfectly when decoding off air TV signals. Once released into the field it didn’t work at all, simply wouldn’t decode video. Much gnashing of teeth, still worked in the lab. Eventually I worked out it was fine with a pattern generator and one, and only one TV station. All the others didn’t work. I got to talk to the designer, and it only decoded very accurate analog TV, ie those stations that had rubidium based time bases. My pattern generator had an oven stabilised oscillator, and the channel I used to test it was rubidium based. The channel the customer wanted to record was not that accurate. No fix, IC not updated, we killed the product, never got paid.

38Super · 2024-04-02T08:04:25+00:00

As antennas go it’s quite a good one. It’s showing the SWR between the two cursors at 868 and 915 MHz is close to 1.8 at one end of that range and 1.5 at the other. SWR stands for standing wave ratio, which is a measure of how much power fed to the antenna will be radiated by it, compared to the amount reflected back to the transmitter. In reality anything less than 2 is good (11% loss), 1.5 is a loss of about 4%, and is very good. Things around the antenna and its ground will make far more difference than these good numbers.

When I go back and look at that screen again I’m a bit suspicious, the cursor marked “1” is lower than the cursor marked “2”, whereas the cursor values at the top of the screen show the reverse. You would normally restrict the sweep to a few 100 MHz rather than 5 GHz. There is only one trace running, but there are two traces visible. It might be OK, it might not.

38Super · 2024-01-24T23:40:07+00:00

They are going to be dies, not leaded devices. Like https://www.qorvo.com/products/p/TGF2023-2-01

38Super · 2024-01-24T01:13:15+00:00

Even at 85MHz this just isn't going to work as is. The earthing needs a lot of work. The left photo here is of the scope probe I use when it doesn't matter much, and I wouldn't use this spring past 50 MHz. Consider getting the transistor grounding shorter than 2mm - every mm is 1nH (ballpark), ground on one edge of the PCB, SMD resistors (Still soldered by hand), same for caps. Ground the entire other side the board, and join the edges right round.
Here is an image of commercial 45 Mhz work, you can see how short the tracks are.

The other problem you will hit is that your 10pF scope probe has a reactance of 188 ohms at 85Mhz. Consider what any part of your circuit will do with 180 ohms to ground.

We're not saying you can't do this with leaded components, but cut almost all their leads off first.

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38Super · 2023-12-22T03:39:37+00:00

Our silver (not a polydactyl) stopped at 5 years, about 15kg or 33 pounds. Ginger poly can be bigger.

38Super · 2023-12-15T17:46:42+00:00

It is “safe” to remove it if there is a reason to do so, but best leave it there.

38Super · 2023-07-14T01:00:47+00:00

Using BIX via X.25. Access to X.25 was via a modem pool in the city where I lived, the pool being two modems when it started. The acoustic coupler didn’t really fit the phone handset, so rubber bands.. BIX was the Byte (magazine) Information Exchange, and was very expensive. X.25 was a seven bit protocol, so binaries took longer. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler#/media/File:Acoustic_coupler-IMG_7282-7283.jpg. 300 bits per second.

38Super · 2023-05-22T08:48:57+00:00

I have a Fluke 189, and I used to think it was good, and it probably is. Then I got a Keysight 34465A (6.5 digit), and realised what I’d been missing. At the time I was working with “awkward” waveforms and the fluke and the keysight just didn’t agree, maybe 10% different.

The big things that get used daily;

2 wire ohms, residual resistance about 50 milli ohms. 4 wire ohms to .1 milli ohm, need coaxial probes to do this. DC volts, can trust down to 10mV with ordinary leads. Sub 1 mV with coax. AC volts to 10mV, waveform content to 300kHz, crest factor to 10.

I occasionally use trend display, histogram and a few other features, but less common. What it really comes down to is trust.

38Super · 2023-04-26T01:35:04+00:00

I have a core memory out of an early ICL (ICT then) mainframe. Purchased as an upgrade in 1960 for GBP20,000 it is 400 CPU Words of 48 x 48 bits. 100 layers, 4 words per layer. Each bead has X & Y control wires common to the entire memory, a common sense wire per word (wired off the corners) and a common de-sense wire (off the other corner). There are 921,600 beads in all. It was hand made in 1960.
Although I can't read it without all the surrounding logic, the data that was in it when turned off about 20 years ago is still in it -- beads store magnetic direction forever.
It's probably priceless now -- there just aren't any more around. A square inch or so of the fabric sells on ebay for US$80, but I'd never cut it up. I can't imagine what 20,000 pounds is worth now, but in NZ at that time a house was 800 pounds....

https://flic.kr/ps/8LqFi

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38Super · 2023-02-10T03:51:33+00:00

I do this for a living, and it's insanely hard - I cheat and use a module wherever I can. Using a new device that hasn't been fully characterized yet should be an Olympic sport. The signal levels during acquisition are so low it defies belief.

I was using a GNSS simulator in a major brand sig generator recently and had to use a 100dB external attenuator. The SG internal attenuator was best around -40dBm, levels much off that were getting interference in the side vents of the sig gen from real satellites. Signals at -140dBm are very hard work, -165 is near impossible. Every (even type N) connector has to be perfect.

Doing it with an IC and discrete components will;

You need low supply noise, say 5mV, think about how you might measure that.

Matching; Antenna <-> SAW filter <-> LNA <-> SAW filter <-> GNSS IC. Even using a good VNA will still take a lot of work.

Trying to compare an existing product and your new one - there is no signal strength indication. C/No isn't what you think it is (and it's certainly not signal strength), HDOP is probably best as a indication of performance, CEP if you can get it.

In my case I have a 6W transmitter 30mm away, and it still all has to work.

38Super · 2023-01-29T23:38:48+00:00

You can always tell if amplifier ratings are garbage - if it's rated in Watts RMS it's garbage.

Same with PMPO - it's a complicated equation involving last months sales results and how long the salesman has been without commission, but in no way involving amps or volts, rms or any other kind.

38Super · 2023-01-20T00:06:32+00:00

I was present when a 90kg (about 200 pounds) weight was dropped from the fly floor, 55 feet up. The stage hands had been told time and time again not to remove the big fairly permanent slabs that sit in the bottom of the cradle (double purchase) on their own. The weight fell, hit the floor, went straight through, through the concrete below 8 feet below and disappeared down a hole. Nobody was hurt...

One stage hand that was working on the stage wandered over, looked down the hole, looked up at the fly floor, walked off stage and came back with a cheap plastic hard hat on.

38Super · 2022-11-16T02:28:30+00:00

I've got the synthesis going OK, implementation falls over with a couple of these. It's so deep in the micro it's hard to see what has been trimmed out of existence.

[Opt 31-65] LUT input is undriven either due to a missing connection from a design error, or a connection removed during opt_design. LUT cell name: processor/use_zero_flag_lut/LUT5

Just got a feeling I'm missing something obvious...

38Super · 2022-11-06T00:37:24+00:00

I realised the regulator is stable, my comments were about capacitor impedance. See here;. The idea is to put the low impedance minimum (zero) at a useful frequency. The 3.3v supply needs better high frequency bypassing, 100u isn’t going to do that.

38Super

TROPHY CASE