OK chums, what shall I do with....

[ban-all-sheds]

(Subtitled - it's amazing what you find in boxes in the far reaches of the loft, beyond the Banger Of The Head Sentinel, in the Land Of The Spider...)

A Metrohm D211 PAT

A BT 18C bridge ohmmeter

given that I have no desire to become a PA tester or a telecoms engineer.

Funky yellow clamshell cases. Guess I could turn one into a lunchbox.


I'm sure they seemed like a good idea at the time, but I have no idea what that idea was.

 

[TheGayOwl]

I would offer to buy the PAT if I enjoyed being bored to death by endless toasters, kettles, heaters etc!

Can I say well done for the statement "given that I have no desire to become a PA tester". It irks me when it is called PAT testing.....it could be called that if you were to test your PAT with a PAT ie portable appliance tester testing..! Its like Microsoft NT Technology...

Strange I get annoyed by it as I am not normally bothered by such lil things. Think I must be getting cantankerous .

 

[chivers67]

Ebay?

 

[JACKC]

PAT testing it is called. Tautoligy is when the word in the title is used in the description. Bit like LCD display.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Can I say well done for the statement "given that I have no desire to become a PA tester".

I reserve the right to reconsider.

 

[chivers67]

Nice tie

 

[Guitarguy]

ah my dad (works for bt) has one of those ohmmeter things in his garage and has done for years. I have no idea what its for or what its supposed to do, i have over the years several times attempted to get it to do something but i can't work it out

 

[ebee]

I would offer to buy the PAT if I enjoyed being bored to death by endless toasters, kettles, heaters etc!

Can I say well done for the statement "given that I have no desire to become a PA tester". It irks me when it is called PAT testing.....it could be called that if you were to test your PAT with a PAT ie portable appliance tester testing..! Its like Microsoft NT Technology...

Strange I get annoyed by it as I am not normally bothered by such lil things. Think I must be getting cantankerous .

Me too.

PIN Number is another one (Hooh I hate it! LOL).

Ban - would that be a "Wheatstone Bridge" type thingy? I remember them at school along with log books, slide rules and those adding machines with a handle - before uncle Clive and his Sinclair Cambridge!

Oh the days when we could add up and think with our heads! A GOLDEN AGE long gone methinks.

Ebay or Arthur Negus (OK then David Dickinson if you prefer) might be a good start - your local museum might be interested too - not got a wind up record player have you? we destroyed loadsa them years ago - sorry to say

Two tin cans an a piece of taut string - before mobile phones - eehh they were good too

 

[ricicle]

Two tin cans an a piece of taut string - before mobile phones - eehh they were good too

You snob - we had to make do with yoghurt pots !

 

[JohnW2]

Two tin cans an a piece of taut string - before mobile phones - eehh they were good too

You snob - we had to make do with yoghurt pots !

No, not snobbery but age! When tin cans and string were in their heyday, there were few/no plastic pots and very little yoghurt (and what little yoghurt there was came in glass).

Anyway, cans work better

Sound transmission is fascinating. A few months back I helped a friend pull some SWA through about 50m of underground ducting. We thought we might need to use mobile phones to communicate from one end to the other (it was not line-of-sight) - but the reality was that even wisphering near one end of the duct could be clearly heard at the other end of the duct.

Kind Regards, John

 

[Paul_C]

Ban - would that be a "Wheatstone Bridge" type thingy?

The 18C is. It has switch ranges which configure the bridge in various ways for easy measurement of loop resistance, position of earth or contact with another circuit etc. It also has the facility to inject an a.c. signal in order to get an estimate of the distance to a disconnection by way of capacitance measurements, and includes insulation resistance testing as well:

http://www.jmwlimited.co.uk/Ohmmeter_18C_Bridge_Ohmmeter.html

I still have a Post Office 18A, which was the earlier 1960's/70's version.

You can usually see a few 18C's on eBay at any given time, so certainly a quick way to sell.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Yeah - I should watch for a while and see what they go for.

Mine looks in pretty good condition, and does work (measured a few resistors).

I found the receipt - I paid £20.50 inc P&P, so I might make a profit.

I have a feeling that I might have bought it to see if I could use it to measure earth rod impedances, but not sure.

 

[Symptoms]

JohnW2 wrote:
"... but the reality was that even wisphering near one end of the duct could be clearly heard at the other end of the duct."

Yep, what was good for HMS Cumberland, Essex, not to mention hundreds of other RN warships is also good for HMS JohnW2. Did you remember to blow down the duct to activate the whistle at the other end?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Back in the days when (few) people saw much wrong with young women in hotpants, mini skirts, tight t-shirts and even bikinis on the stands, and when the industry was full of (nay, consisted only of) proprietary companies, products and protocols etc, I was at an exhibition (probably Compec) and there was a company there touting an asynch comms package whose selling point was an extraordinarily robust error correction protocol which could cope with the worst links imaginable.

To demo it they had 2 PDP8s linked via transducers inside tin cans connected with a piece of string, and they were shuffling data back and forth over it. You could go onto the stand and pluck the string, and observe no data loss.

Hideously slow bandwidth even for those days, and long recovery times, but blow me it worked.

 

[JohnW2]

Yep, what was good for HMS Cumberland, Essex, not to mention hundreds of other RN warships is also good for HMS JohnW2. Did you remember to blow down the duct to activate the whistle at the other end?

I may be fairly vociferous, but even my mouth couldn't get around a 100mm duct to blow into it

Kind Regards, John.