On 03/08/2016 06:33 PM, Gene Heskett wrote: > Never had any issues with it turning on unwanted components. Works > fine in circuit too. A lot of folks, on both the Tek and HP/Agilent > groups are using the instrument, and I kinda went with the flow and > bought a kit. An hour or two in the afternoon, and it's all assembled > up and ready to use. Very handy little instruments, these hand held > ESR meters. > > Mark > Yes, they do an excellent job of measuring the most common electrolytic > capacitor failure, detecting problems 2 years before a loss of > capacitance will be measured by the common DVM in capacitance mode. They > don't have a range to check the psu stuff, so generally speaking, that > mode is similar in usefullness to those appendages on the belly of a > boar hog. > > That $179 Wizard probably saved the station 500k USD in keeping about 15 > DVC-PRO broadcast VCR's going in years of their heyday. Capacitors and > headwheels still cost us at least $100k though. Pinch rollers and other > rubber parts were peanuts in comparison. Panasonic usually asked about > $1500-$2500 a board for a new one, with 11 to 14 boards in a machine, > and a minimum of a thou & parts at MSRP to repair one sent in. That > sort of outgo resulted in permission to buy the wizard in about 30 > seconds. Wasn't hard at all. :) We still have, kept them like trophy > deer horns, 3 ea, 2 lb coffee cans 2/3rds full of those capacitors that > failed. Thats a boatload because most were smaller than the eraser on a > #2 lead pencil, so there are thousands in those coffee cans. All > surface mounted too. And yours truly changed about 75% of them, with my > assistant doing the last 25% after I gave him my office keys & a badly > worn red office chair at a retirement party, on June 30th 2002. But by > 2004 much of that video gear had been replaced with servers with banks > of hard drives. Even the news cameras were insertable HD storage by > then, still are today but replaced with full hidef stuff now. > > Cheers, Gene Heskett
As you know, I like to futz around with older Tek equipment. I usually snatch up the "for parts or not working" units on the Bay of E. Usually the problem(s) is centered in the power supply. First thing I look at after dragging the schematics out are the caps. Visual, then an ESR search. A lot of the units that were made in the era I like to fix have bad electrolytic caps, and a good many have those bad caps that were installed in a lot of other hardware like computers and such. I forget if it was the Chinese or Koreans that tried to make caps based on stolen tech, but a lot of those caps found their way into our electronics. Tek was no different. At any rate, the ESR meter makes troubleshooting power supplies bunches easier. Mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Transform Data into Opportunity. Accelerate data analysis in your applications with Intel Data Analytics Acceleration Library. Click to learn more. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=278785111&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
