![\"\"](\"http:\/\/mail.yimg.com\/nq\/mc\/1_0_0\/mesg\/tsmileys2\/15.gif\")
\u00a0 The rain storm passed through quickly so everything was calm by the end of the day. ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/mail.yimg.com\/nq\/mc\/1_0_0\/mesg\/tsmileys2\/14.gif\")
\u00a0 No noticeable thunder, lightning or hail, though.<\/p>\nWell, it’s Friday the 13th.\u00a0 We just had a Friday the 13th just 13 weeks ago, and we will have another one in 13 weeks.\u00a0 Wow!\u00a0 That’s almost spooky!<\/p>\n
Friday really was Friday the 13th for me and my co-workers.\u00a0 We had several network problems, one which required me to run from one building to another, holding my umbrella tightly to keep it from blowing away as the rain came down heavily.\u00a0 Pants got wet from the knees down. \u00a0 The rain storm passed through quickly so everything was calm by the end of the day. \u00a0 No noticeable thunder, lightning or hail, though.<\/p>\n
Vintage HP Test Equipment<\/strong>\u00a0 When I was a teenager a neighbor kid and I would hang out at the shop in the garage of a neighbor who was a ham.\u00a0 He had a lot of HP test equipment and the usual TEK and other high quality stuff, like General Radio gear.\u00a0 We got to use it if we helped him get a few other things done.\u00a0 We also got to take a ride in his private airplane, and ride to the airport in his Porsche.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n On occasion he would get old test equipment to play with, usually on the condition that it got repaired, or at least troubleshot to find out what was wrong.\u00a0 Some of it was very good quality for its day, just that it had long been superceded by newer versions.\u00a0 An example is this ancient HP 521A frequency counter<\/a>, which used neon lights in a long column with a mask in front with the digits etched into it.\u00a0 Hey, nothing wrong with that; it was a lot easier to read than a binary display!\u00a0 0000, 0001, 0010, etc.\u00a0 There is much more of the same, including manuals in www.HPArchive.com<\/a><\/p>\n The ‘wiggle stick’ meters were Simpson, Triplett, Weston, and of course HP.\u00a0 The John Fluke Company started making high quality test equipment, one of which was the differential voltmeter.\u00a0 This is a later version<\/strong><\/a>; the earlier ones were bigger and heavier.\u00a0 Basically the operator was doing manually what is automatically done today.\u00a0 But you could get accuracy in the millivolts, something you couldn’t do with a regular wiggle stick meter.<\/p>\n One type of test equipment that he had was General Radio gear.\u00a0 This was top of the line for its day, much of the accuracy was due to accuracy in construction and quality in workmanship. One innovative piece of General Radio gear was the GR 874 connector.\u00a0 It was hermaphrodite; any connector would fit any other connector.\u00a0 How?\u00a0 Well, take a look<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Back then the RF equipment for UHF and above was marked KMC\/s (kilomegacycles per second) because Hertz and Giga- had not yet been adopted as a standard.\u00a0 See this NIST page for more info<\/a>.<\/p>\n Quantsuff sent me a link to a Youtube video<\/a> of a very large digital display cranking away.\u00a0 Very innovative.\u00a0 They will never have a shortage of coffee mug holders!<\/p>\n Back to experimenting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, it’s Friday the 13th.\u00a0 We just had a Friday the 13th just 13 weeks ago, and we will have another one in 13 weeks.\u00a0 Wow!\u00a0 That’s almost spooky! Friday really was Friday the 13th for me and my co-workers.\u00a0 We had several network problems, one which required me to run from one building to <\/p>\n (Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,17,25,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics","category-meters-and-test-equipment","category-power-supplies","category-radio-frequency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2233"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2351,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2233\/revisions\/2351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![HP 521A frequency counter<\/a>, which used neon lights in a long column with a mask in front with the digits etched into it.\u00a0 Hey, nothing wrong with that; it was a lot easier to read than a binary display!\u00a0 0000, 0001, 0010, etc.\u00a0 There is much more of the same, including manuals in](\"http:\/\/www.hparchive.com\/Sheldon_Sterling_Collection\/Sheldon-Sterling-Collection_016.jpg\"){kind=link}