Testing the TK Tar Baby

[picowatt]

Ahhh.... I was working up a nice story about "biker" catching a fence... like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape..... I've never fished for a pike, we have largemouth bass around here.

By the way, I got the old RM503 up and running perfectly. The fault was HV insulation breakdown in the 6.3 volt secondary winding of the line transformer that powers the CRT filament.... and which is floated to -3000 volts by a HV power supply running off yet another transformer in the regulated supplies section. So I installed a cheap Radio Shack 6.3 volt transformer, running the primary in parallel with the original and simply running the CRT filament with its HV off of the Radio Shack transformer. I found room inside the box for it, and it's burning in now, has been running fine for a couple of hours.

450 kHz bandwidth, and the slowest timebase setting is 5 seconds per centimeter !

It has a lovely persistent blue phosphor (optimized for film photography they say) and an orange graticle illuminator. And I spell it that way because I want to.

A genuine classic, the Tektronix RM503.

TK,

One can only hope the insulation between the pri/sec of the RS transformer can handle that float voltage. 

450KHz bandwidth and 5sec/cm?  What a crawler.  I love the old high persistance tubes as well.  At a very slow timebase, they a quite mesmerizing.

PW
 

[picowatt]

TK,

One can only hope the insulation between the pri/sec of the RS transformer can handle that float voltage. 

450KHz bandwidth and 5sec/cm?  What a crawler.  I love the old high persistance tubes as well.  At a very slow timebase, they a quite mesmerizing.

PW

TK,

I responded before the image loaded.  She looks real pretty.  It looks to be in excellent condition.

You mentioned a surplus store in the past, do they have a website?

PW

[TinselKoala]

I will NOT answer your questions picowatt.  Any more than I'd answer questions as to whether or not I can read

evidently not

- or spell -

Without a spell checker you can't, as is demonstrated several times on this page alone.

or write - or talk. 

At those you excel, Rosie Poser.

You are relying on this utterly highhanded patronising series of questions and answers to ENDORSE your opinion that I need to be spoken to at the level of an IDIOT.

They are just questions, Leon.

I have no further intention of engaging with you unless and until you show some level of respect for my intelligence.

So NO.  I will not answer your questions.

Rosemary

He's showing all the respect for your intelligence you deserve, Rosie Poser. For example, he's dumbed the questions down by NOT using the  approved and universally understood acronyms for the variables and phenomena he's asking if you understand. And your answers COULD indeed have been simple yes or no answers. But you refuse to do it. Why? Isn't your advisor right at your elbow tonight? Or has he told you that yes, in fact, PW is right? Why are you running away flailing about like someone who has just seen her own ghost?
Perhaps it's because you have.

[picowatt]

TK,

Just let it go.  I'll fight my own battles if I feel it's called for.

In this case, not so much...

Regarding your scope, does that -3000 really go thru the filament transformer or were you saying the filament winding was shorted to the -3000?

Back in the day, when we all watched big glass bottles, filament shorts were common and all manner of filament iso's and brighteners were available.

PW

[TinselKoala]

TK,

I responded before the image loaded.  She looks real pretty.  It looks to be in excellent condition.

You mentioned a surplus store in the past, do they have a website?

PW

Yep, that's what the burn-in is for. If it fails, it will be in the same condition it was when I started, but so far so good, it's been up four hours now....
I got this one directly from NASA Ames. A colleague is a chief scientist there and he picked it up at a surplus disposal auction along with a bunch of other neat stuff, and gave it to me.
The surplus store I deal with here does not have a website, no. And they don't really have much. Two of my three favorites are in Canada:
http://torontosurplus.com/
http://www.activesurplus.com/
The first is run by someone who knows what he's got and charges full market rate but will ship to the States. The second is wild and crazy, you never can tell what they will have and there are some good deals there. Also will ship stateside I believe.
And the third was in the Bay Area in CA: Mike Quinn's, but it's been closed for years now.
Around here there isn't really much to choose from, even though we have 5 or six military bases or ex-bases nearby.