Over the years, I have accumulated many used computer power bricks. Although I could just use them by themselves to power other electronics with similar voltage and current requirements, I thought I would combine a few of them together as…
I did a review and teardown of an HT118A multimeter. It is a rather generic 6000 counts true RMS auto-ranging meter. If you have not watched the video of this review, please check it out below. I also did a…
I was going through some of the components I accumulated over the years and stumbled upon a Hewlett Packard YIG tuned oscillator (part number 5086-7023) that I bought a while back. This YIG oscillator was made for a frequency extension…
In the area where I live, the cell phone reception is spotty at the best. Even though I am only a couple of miles from a nearest tower, I barely get any cell signal at all let along usable 4G…
A fuse is a sacrificial device for the protection the rest of the circuit in an over-current situation. There are situations we need to know with some reasonable confidence what the actual maximum current is for a given fuse without…
I have been travelling quite a bit for the last year or so and have not been able to drive my car as frequently as I would have liked. As a result, I often left my car at the airport…
A while back, I did a teardown on a dual-channel Amrel PPS-2322 programmable power supply, and was quite impressed by its solid construction. Recently, I found another Amrel power supply on eBay and this time it is a single channel…
The latest addition to my lab equipment is a Keithley 230 programmable voltage source which can output up to ±100V. Unlike many of the power supplies and voltage sources I have, the Keithley 230 is capable of operating in all…
I recently picked up a downconverter box on eBay. My original plan was to use the enclosure for another project as it has a very nice aluminum enclosure. Naturally of course, I wanted to take a look at what kind…
Electrophoresis power supplies are commonly found in biology and other life sciences laboratories. These power supplies are usually capable of supplying high voltages and high currents required for gel electrophoresis–a method used for separating DNA, RNA and other protein fragments…
I picked up a Marconi 2305 modulation meter off eBay the other day. As the name indicated, a modulation meter is used to measure the modulation characteristics of a source signal. The Marconi 2305 is capable of measuring amplitude/frequency and…
In my previous blog posting, I did a teardown of a LogiMetrics A300/S 2 to 4 GHz Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier (TWTA). After doing the teardown, my focus immediately turned to troubleshooting the unit and hopefully restoring the unit back…
I just picked up a LogiMetrics A300/S 2 GHz to 4 GHz (S band) traveling wave tube amplifier (TWTA) on eBay. I had done an extreme teardown of an HP 493A TWTA a while ago and it was quite fascinating…
Monochromator is one of those things that has always fascinated me. Over the years, I have done quite a few experiments (I, II, III) with an EP200Mmd monochromator and it was a lot of fun. Because monochromators are such highly…
I was doing some experiments which involves switching high voltages (>3 kV) under high current (>30 Amps) load. Although solid state devices such as SCRs (Silicon Controlled Rectifier, or Thyristor) or IGBTs are the ideal candidates for this kind of…