I just picked up a Keithley 775A programmable frequency counter from eBay. Specification-wise, this counter is very similar to the Racal Dana 1992 frequency counter I repaired last year. The Keithley 775A I got came with an additional channel (option…
Although LED light bulbs have been around for a while, I have not been able to totally replace all my lights in the house to LED ones until quite recently. The main reason is that some of my existing light…
I recently bought an HP 8671A microwave frequency synthesizer on eBay. This synthesizer can generate signals from 2GHz to 6.2GHz with an unleveled output of more than 8dBm. It is a nice complement to my HP 8642B signal generator and…
My video on the teardown of an HP 493A traveling wave tube amplifier had generated quite a bit of interest. After I revealed that the electron gun portion of the tube was radioactive, a couple of my YouTube channel viewers…
I few months back, I wrote about my experience with the six dimmable Philips LED bulbs I purchased a year ago. Those light bulbs all failed within months of each other in just over a year of use. This time…
I recently picked up a BK Precision 1696 programmable switching power supply off eBay. Unlike many of the vintage test equipment I did teardowns with in the past, this model is still in production today. The one I got was…
The last ingredient for my backup power project is an inverter. Since the battery bank I built is a 12V 1.5kWh one, an inverter that can handle a load between 500W and 1000W would be a suitable choice. In theory,…
I recently purchased a BSide ACM03 Plus clamp meter so that I could do some high current measurements for my tab welder project. This meter can be bought on eBay for around $25, which makes it one of the cheapest…
I just picked up another high voltage power supply, this time it is a working Bertan/Spellman 225-20R 20kV one. Unlike the Bertan 205A-05R that I did a teardown with last time which was entirely analog, this one can be controlled…
I recently was given a broken Epson PowerLite 84 projector. The projector would not turn on when plugged in and there was no sign of life. So I decided to take a look at what was wrong with it. The…
I bought a non-working Lambda LQ-521 linear power supply on eBay a couple of weeks ago. Usually I avoid knowingly buying something that is broken unless I am certain that I could obtain parts for it at a reasonable price.…
I did a teardown of an RSA SecurID many years ago (you can see that post here). In that teardown, it was an older generation (SD600) of the RSA SecurID. In this post, let’s take a look at what’s inside…
I did a teardown video of a microwave range (8-10 GHz) RF isolator last week. As a follow up, I will post some of the high-resolution pictures I took during the process here (click to see larger images).
Today at a time when digital storage oscilloscopes (DSO) are almost ubiquitous, analog scopes like Tektronix 2465 remain popular among many electronics hobbyists, especially among amateur radio operators who routinely work with high frequency circuits. I got my 2465 from…
The latest addition to my lab is an HP 8566B spectrum analyzer. This isn’t just any spectrum analyzer, it was perhaps the best spectrum analyzer money could buy back in the late 80’s. While it was discontinued in 1997 and…