Man I had a lot of trouble figuring out what these things are called. I can tell you that they are not called F-Type, BNC, SMA, N-Type, or PL-259 connectors. In the I end I asked about this and learned these connectors are called Belling-Lee connectors, also known as IEC 169-2 Female/Male. But if you search for “IEC connector” (which these things are apparently sometimes called) you will only find the power adapters, not these aerial connectors.
I have built a new computer ‘trail‘ out of my old workstation ‘tradition‘. I was able to do this because I migrated the VirtualBox VMs that were running on ‘tradition’ over to QEMU/KVM VMs now running on ‘lore‘.
My new computer ‘trail’ is setup as the recording workstation for the “booth” in my studio. This is good because now I can record at 4K in the booth!
I don’t use Windows much these days but this new studio workstation runs Windows 11 Pro. I haven’t used software RAID on Windows before but for this workstation I setup a RAID1 mirror using 2x 2TB NVMe drives. I was able to configure the block size for the NTFS file system so I picked 2MB (which was the maximum) as this RAID array will only be for storing video recordings (which are huge files).
Man. So. Today, this happened. I was watching a new video from Adrian Black and his EEVBlog multimeter failed:
I have been saving my pennies and planning to buy an EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter because a lot of the makers around the interwebs have one as a nod to Dave Jones over on the EEVBlog, but that’s just so embarrassing that it’s failing. Of all the equipment you have you need to trust your test equipment the most and this is… well, just sad I guess.
In this video I do the third Maxitronix 10in1 Electronic Project Lab project: Diode Experiment.
When I looked at the resistor on the bottom I thought it was red – brown – black – gold which would have been 21Ω but I think I misread brown and that was actually purple which would be 27Ω which stacks better with the two measurements I made both of which said 27Ω.
In the video we examine the forward voltage of our germanium diode and get various readings. Typically a germanium diode should be around 0.3V versus silicon diodes which are usually around 0.7V.
On the FNIRSI component tester the Ir is the “reverse current”, also known as the “leakage current”. This is the small amount of current which flows through the diode when it is reverse biased (that is, basically, connected the wrong way around).
I asked ChatGPT a few questions about diodes and their specifications which you can read here: Germanium Diode Forward Voltage if you’re at all interested in such things. Of course you should be doubly suspicious of anything you read on the internet. :)
The really amazing learning for me in this experiment was how hot the germanium diode got versus the lamp, which was so surprising. Just goes to show how good an idea it is to actually do experiments and measure things! The thermal imager we used was the UNI-T UTi260B.
Also I think I’m coming around to the view that an oscilloscope is a pretty poor voltmeter. My oscilloscope is an MSO5074 70MHz 4 Channel MIXED SIGNAL OSCILLOSCOPE and I love it but I think in future I will limit my use of the oscilloscope to situations where I’m actually dealing with some sort of oscillator. I think simple digital multimeters would have been better test equipment to use for the kinds of readings I was trying to take in this experiment.
I hope you enjoy the video. Stay tuned for the upcoming projects. If you’re interested in seeing them don’t forget to subscribe!
Also, if you’re interested in getting any of these Maxitronix kits yourself the best place I know to look is on eBay. Let me know if you find them somewhere else!
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I found the following four videos on the AlphaPhoenix channel explaining various aspects of the propagation of electricity, which goes some way to explaining how the high impedance headphone might work in my 10in1 2/10 project.
In the first video I learned about AppCAD Design Assistant which is a free tool which boasts a broad bunch of features (and, particularly, it can help you design an antenna on your PCB):
S-Parameter Analysis and Plotting
Active Circuit Bias Design
Cascade Noise and IP3 Analysis
Transmission Line Analysis
Signals and Systems
Complex Math Engineering Calculator
I haven’t used AppCAD yet, but I will check it out soon.
