Hi welcome to everyone's favorite segment: Mailbag where I just opened my mail. Let's get straight into it. This one's from Australia, No worries, this one's from El Zhang in uh Randwick? Yeah, I'm here in Sydney, so let's check it out. Oh, by the way, um.

Flux Gate condenser t-shirt um uh. on sale again at my teespring store. Link down below. this is the one my hand drawn one with the equations on it.

Beauty. Let's uh, let's go. Of course. it's uh, cheapest for uh, those in the Us? Um, shipping's a little bit pricey, but it's like 15 bucks or something.

Um, oh well. It's 15 bucks for the shirt, which is pretty good and I get a decent commission on that too. So um, it helps. support the blog.

Hi Dave. Oh oh okay, yes, I thought, um L was um, familiar. He sent in the uh, power vector scope before so he found he says the companion for it. Let's have a look.

ah sweet that looks pretty sweet. Look at that. test pattern generator. Wow, that looks neat.

We'll um, do a, uh, two minute tear down on that puppy. Nice. Thanks El Alanya Test pattern generator. Never heard of Alanya, I'm never seen them.

I guess they make a well. they at least make video pattern generators. industry specific stuff. a couple of buttons missing on here and uh, this is all like games so you can choose your different uh, pattern and stuff like that.

There's your typical staircase and things like that. you've got Rgb and all that sort of stuff and monochrome and color. and uh, you can set your chroma level. Oh man, look at that.

unbelievable you Bloody Ripper. Made in Australia? Made in Australia? No worries. look at that other young ah, lanyard. Kind of almost sounds um, aboriginal.

but uh yeah. the Dyndima group I've heard of. um I can't. Yeah, like it's an old name that certainly rings a bell.

Um, but there you go. It's yeah. made in Australia? Beautiful. Let's crack her open ha ha.

old school look at this even tin plate job. Wow. Fantastic. And it's like all yeah, like 4000 series Cmos stuff.

I think it's almost all exclusively 4000 series semi stuff Ln319 down here, Ca 4301. So a couple of operators, ah, 74c haha. There we go. But about 1987 88 vintage.

Looking at, uh, some of the date codes on this thing. We've got a genuine bodge wire happening there going across there, so that's a bit how you doing. But yeah, 1988 there we go. 74c series? um yeah, it's all just discreet stuff.

Brilliant. I built my own uh Tv pattern generator back in the day. that would have been yeah, late 80s around about the same vintage. It was much simpler than this.

don't know where it is these days. it's probably in an old project box somewhere. but yeah, that that just used uh, similar sort of stuff. I think I used uh 74, um Hc stuff back then to do it all and check out our Rf output box.

So they've got an Rf modulator here for, um, that's fairly unusual. I don't think I've seen a Tv pattern generator with an Rf output on the thing. Anyway, they got this cells, a separate board. once again, tin plated.

It's all very sort of. you know, handmade how you doing. I like the uh, like the cable ties there with the wiring loom. That's very nice.

Got ourselves a nice uh, 10 turn. Well, they're all. Are they all? No, they're only. these are only single turn jobs, but this is a nice 10 turn job here.

That's the frequency. but look at this. Oh, flapping around in the breeze. Um, a screw did fall out of this before.

so yeah, oops, I've got it. Let me put that back on and check it out. This thing's a Bobby Dazzler. Look at that.

We're gonna win a chicken dinner. That's our staircase pattern there and I've got my scope set up for Tv triggering, which you don't get to use much these days, but you know we can sync on the line and we can stick on line numbers and all that sort of jazz doesn't trigger that well on the color. So yeah, not sure what the deal is there. but uh.

anyway, this thing works. A treat. There we go, can see the individual up and see the lines there. we can stop that and we can zoom in.

And there's our staircase pattern. and of course We can uh, choose all the other ones as well. All the other different types, the Rgb and the monochrome and all that sort of jazz. Beautiful.

This thing works great. But of course the most impressive thing about this is the Rf modulation here. Look, it can go up from, you know, it can go like the whole Tv range here. Nice.

And as I said, show before, it's got that 10 turn pot for the frequency. We can adjust our Rf level, We can add tones and it's brilliant. I've never seen that on a Uh on a test pattern generator. I don't think anyway.

so thank you very much L who wishes to remain anonymous apart from the L, his last name Zhang. If I'm pronouncing that correctly, thank you very much. I don't actually have a decent pattern generator here in the lab, so you know on the rare occasions that you need one of these puppies, this will come in handy. Very nice.

It's only it's pal only. I don't think there's a don't think there's an Ntsc option on this. They had a 4.43 megahertz color burst power crystal oscillator inside the thing. So yeah, I think it's pal only.

but that's right, I'm in Australia. Next up, one from Yankee land. This one comes from Peter Millet. He's uh, from Mckinney in Texas Hi to all my Texan viewers with their guns and their 40 gallon hats.

Or is that a stereotype? Sorry, Can't help but. oh, there we go. That's easy. That's some serious just says, um, test equipment? No idea why? Oh oh okay, let's have a look.

let's have a look. It's a current measurement interface. Ah, nice. Okay, check it out.

There we go. That's a pretty sweet looking current measurement interface. Obviously going to be, uh, isolated. I would presume.

It gives out 100 millivolts per amp. Um, so it's a fixed. It's designed for high current stuff. I'd look.

so it's sweet. We'll do a mini teardown and have a quick squeeze at that. Nice! So here's this nice little current measurement interface, which uh, Pete sent in. He actually designs and that sells this.

He's got his own little company Pm Test Equipment and it's a quite affordable, high current, uh, isolated measurement device. And that's the important part. The output is isolated from the input, unlike for example, the microcurrent. A lot of people you know don't realize this is common question.

it is not isolated. this output here which you can go regularly to your multimeter. The multimeter is isolated because it's battery powered. If you hook this up to an oscilloscope then that is actually connected directly through to here.

The ground is actually common. so you know it is not an isolated current measurement device. only if you use it with an isolated oscilloscope or an isolated multimeter. But this thing is inherently isolated so you can hook it up to your regular scope.

Brilliant! Um, now for not huge bandwidth, it's only uh, 400 kilohertz, but that's you know, on the order of the um, similar order to the microcurrent. so you know it's fairly decent for a lot of Uh switching applications and stuff like that. It's got a nice little zero adjust on there so you can level out any Dc offset. It's got dual plug pack well, you only need a single plug packing, but the reason it's got two is that you can daisy chain to another one if you're doing a multi-channel testing.

And of course it's only designed for high currents because we've got 100 millivolts per amp output. so it's not like you can measure you know, down in the milliamps or microamps or anything like that. It's designed for high current applications and Ta-da we're in like Flynn. There we go.

There's our hall effect device. Let's take a look. Well, there's not much going on here. all we've got is a hall effect uh, current sense.

A nice big fat trace happening there. I like that and it's a little uh, five pin job which I do not recognize at all and I'll show you that up close. I can't find anything on the markings there, but uh, we've just got ourselves a Um Op amp down in here just to gain that up. and uh, looks like I was a little trim pot sealed there and that probably uh, sets the gain Um, and of course we've got our Dc offset adjustment in there and that's about all she wrote.

We're going to power supply with a To220, um, upside down here. Did Pete goof up the Uh pin out for that and flip it over? Or was he trying to mount on some heat sink upside down or what? I'm not sure what's going on there anyway. Um, let's have a look at the uh. Hall effect sensor and there it is.

Nice looking Smd hall effect current sensor. But for the life of me, um, both David too and I are here busily trying to find a similar device. Um, the the Fd number there. none of that is matching and all the usual, uh, supplier or all the usual manufacturer suspects for uh, such, hall effect sensors aren't uh, aren't showing up anything? I'm sure somebody will uh, come and tell us and embarrass us and it'll be dead easy.

But anyway, can't get any info on that off the bat. So yes, Hall effect sensor remains a mystery there. We've just got a old school, uh, bur brown, uh, Op Amp down in there and yeah, not much else. Um, soldering is not.

The soldering could be a bit better on the back side. there it's That's a little bit how you're doing, but uh. anyway. that is neatly laid out, no problems whatsoever.

and it's 600 volt Cat 2 rated. It's got the recess safety banana plugs on there. not as convenient as binding posts, but yeah, I can understand why that's done. So it's got, uh, it's got proper Cliff branded ones in there.

I spared no expense there. And yeah, that should really do the business. But as I said for high currents, only because it's 100 millivolts per amp with 50 ohm output impedance. Not that that's going to matter at the sort of frequencies we're talking about there.

And here we go. I'm doing something weird with this. I'm measuring its own clucker. Look, I'm using my Rigol scope here.

and I'm actually measuring the current of the Rygol scope. I've actually got. this is the power cord in series, which is going into our isolated current measurement adapter. So I'm able to actually measure the current draw of this scope on the scope itself.

And there it is. Bingo! There's our current draw. So our current adapter has a scale of 100 millivolts per amp. and we're 10 millivolts per division there.

So you know, one, two, three, four, five. So we're looking at. you know, half an amp, uh, peak current and peak-to-peak current there. And that's what our current waveform looks like because we've got a switch mode uh converter inside this thing so it's going to look pretty awful like this.

But there you go. It can measure its own clacker. Beautiful. So there you go.

There's no way you could, uh, do this, uh, safely if you didn't have one of these isolated current measurement adapters. So it's good for like, Maine's uh, sort of powered stuff like this. That's pretty neat. Thank you very much Pete for sending that one.

That'll come in handy in the lab here, no doubt. And if you want to get one, I'll link it in down below. Uh, 290? I believe it's Us dollars linked in down below. Check it out.

Next up. one from the Sand Mark team. They're a company. They're a team.

Thank you very much Team Sandmark. They're in, uh, uh. San Diego, California. Awesome.

Been to San Diego so didn't see a huge amount of San Diego. but uh, didn't go to Seaworld there. That wasn't very impressive. Sorry, um, no, it didn't Wasn't really that keen on sea world.

Okay, oh yes, right. What we have here is designed in California. made in China. Obviously designed in California.

Yeah, if you can see that, it's a, um, one of these, um, Gopro selfie stick things which are all the rage. Thank you very much guys. Apparently I think they emailed me about this. It's like a, um, super duper I think there's something else in there as well.

Decent quality selfie stick. and it does feel really quite decent indeed. So that just locks does that? Yeah, that. just locks in place.

could do with a bit more grip on that, but that's still pretty good. that that feels solid, that feels really good. I like it. Selfie Stick: Thank you very much guys.

Excellent! I'll link it in down below if you want a decent quality selfie stick. It extends 40 inches, retracts 17, and it retracts to 17 inches. It's a aluminium pole. I don't say what type of aluminium I assume.

it's like a, uh, marine kind of grade or whatever. Hang on. That's a fail for me. not the product.

I sort of took it apart and now I can't get these little plastic clippy things back in. and oh no, I just did. Oh magic. There you go.

Awesome. No worries, not a product fail. It's a Dave Fail. So here's our Sandmark selfie stick.

And well. it's just a selfie stick. It doesn't even go at right angles or anything. I don't know.

Weird. It's got a nice big rubber grip on it. Anyway, it comes with this, um, rather sexy looking pouch. But um, I don't.

I don't get it. What? What Do I? What do I stick this in here? Do I have to? What? It's just a no. It's like it's got all these little pouchy things and all these little attachment points, right? This is called the armor bag. I had to look on the website to get it and apparently your selfie stick clips in here.

By the way, this thing's um, 29.95 or something like that. Decent, um, not bad price for a decent quality up waterproof selfie stick. So they claim Waterproof It's just aluminium and rubber and some plastic. Anyway, this sort of clips in here like this and this is an accessory pouch for all your Gopro stuff.

So your 20 million batteries go in here. Your Gopros sit in here, right? And all your little bloody 10 million accessory clips for your Gopro that you get. they all clip in here. Well, if you're a Gopro freak, fine me.

It's like, well, I don't barely even take a selfie stick. It's like, yeah, okay. selfie stick Camera: It's like I don't need 20 million accessories and if I'm going on one of these mud runs, I'm not going to carry one of these with me. One of these mud obstacle endurance events I go on.

I: if I need a spare battery, I put a spare battery inside a ziplock bag and stuff it down my undies. Anyway, that thing's um, 40 bucks I think. I mean it's decent quality. if you need a is it got a No.

It's got a little carry handle on it. so if you need a sort of all-in-one thing to carry all your Gopro accessories on, Sure it does the business. But yeah, and yes, I wasn't kidding. I literally do stuff a spare pattern battery down my undies.

works. A treat. Next up, one from Slovakia. We don't get many from Slovakia.

Is it the first one? Maybe maybe not. But yeah, Hi to all my Slovakian viewers say that three times quickly. Anyway, thank you very much. Uh, Michael Rendos.

He's from Bratislava. Bratislavia in terrific and it's a present It says. I think so. let's see what Michael has sent in.

He's saying it's not this one of these, uh, netgear things. Yeah, Kind of figured that. Ah, that's really. Geez.

Is this like it's like sticky paper? It's got. um, it's got glue on the paper. It's rather rather unusual. Is that common? Anyway, let's have a look.

Oh geez. Now now it's like it's sealed everything shut. Wow. Okay, let's give it a bill.

Here we go. We're in like Flynn Errol that is. Oh geez. Getting there, we've got a note.

There we go. Now we're talking. let's see what Michael has sent. Oh, lots of postcards we'll take a look at.

We'll get to the good stuff. Hang on. Not that postcards aren't good, but uh, it's a, I think a mini. It's a two minute tear down.

It looks like, um, a an industrial, uh, you know, a voltmeter type panel meter type thing. Yeah, it's three and a half digits. so we'll do a two minute tear down on that. And oh, we even have the schematic look at that beauty.

Don't often get schematics for that sort of jazz. And uh, Michael. thanks for um, seeing what a vintage never used voltage meter and a D converter made in 1987. it's the M1t335 for all you people playing along at home.

Uh, it is customizable for voltage ranges by swapping internal resistors. Yeah, that's quite common. Uh, fast four bit digi, four bit output digital output to connect with other devices as well. That's unusual.

I guess you can set like thresholds and things like that. hang on. kind of. Sneeze And Michael sent us some lovely postcards from Slovakia.

Lovely pictures. I think they're photos that I don't know if he's taken them, but maybe he has. I don't know. But uh.

there you go, Slovakia. Awesome. Not sure if I'll ever get to Slovakia. don't think it's ever been on my list, but doesn't that look fantastic? Wow, yeah, that's a nice hearty photo like that one.

And look at those mountains. Yeah, Ah, lovely stuff. Geez, I'm yep. see ya, I'm going Bush.

So let's crack this puppy open and uh, see what's in it? Look at that. It's got some weird-ass connector on the back. Hmm. sort of looks like an almost like an Idc type thing that splices cables.

like just push them on top. Anyway, let's get in there. and there you go. check out the square traces.

The electrons are just going to go flying off the corners there. Anyway, it's got some boarder board wiring like that. It's a bit how you're doing. I love the uh, bent leads on the resistors there.

There we go to stand those off. You can see that they've formed them in there to have. There's one right here. Wow.

I haven't seen those since the since the 70s. maybe. ah, more square traces. Look at that.

There's lots of uh, discrete logic and transistor action happening on here, but uh, a lot of magic seems to be happening in Uh 102. Was it Ic102? But it's a C520d? Whatever the hell that is. I don't know. It's uh, it doesn't ring a bell.

But yeah. go for your life. There you go. Very old school panel meter.

Wow. It's still useful because you can get in there and you can program the thing for the different Uh ranges. I think you can go for 100 millivolts up to uh, a thousand volts. Um, full scale can also do what current as well.

100 microns full scale up to one amp with a shunt. So that's a neat little thing. Is it made in Czechoslovakia? He's only got the Uh Czech manual for it. It's got a rather bizarre retention clip systems just like a little bit of like a fiberglass hanging off there, so you just loosen that and it comes out, swings around and the whole assembly just pulls out.

Bizarre. Thank you very much Michael. Good two minute tear down. I won't take it any further.

There's not terribly anything exciting in there, you know, just a couple of dip packages and stuff like that. Don't it ruin it? Still a good functional uh pedal meter. No worries, a little trimmer in there. Look at the size of that monster.

I haven't haven't seen a trimmer in that package. It's like a, you know, one of those uh, 10 turn Pcb trimmers, right? It's a teasel A or something. What is it? Tesla? Ah, it's Tesla. You won't believe where this one's from Antarctica? Well, maybe not.

It was sent from the U.s but that is. Um, if it's from Ricky. Foshi. Good day, Ricky.

Um, and it has Mcmurdo Station Antarctica on it. So I figure that Ricky has been uh, based in Antarctica? in at the Mcmurdo Station at some point. Um, it's you know, it's got a Us. uh, sort of.

You know, it looks like it was sent from the Us. But um. anyway. the Mcmurdo Station.

Well, Mcmurdo Station is the Us station in Antarctica, isn't it? Um, Australia owns. I believe Australia owns, well, owns. sort of. You know, is responsible for the majority of the land mass in Antarctica.

So I believe let's see what Ricky sent in. and uh, it's a nice, solid, nice, solid wall box like that. Geez, built like a brick. Dunny, that thing doesn't survive an antarctic blizzard.

We have a cap. Yep, Mcmurdo Station Antarctica. I can tell everyone that I've been to the Mcmurdo Station in Antarctica. Freaking awesome.

Thank you very much Ricky. I might go wear that out at lunchtime. There we go, even though it's winter time here. Penguin: Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Oh, Sagan's going to love that. So a little huxty oh, that's pretty crap product design. Geez.

didn't waddle much for Oh no. Ah fail. What else? We got Mcmurdo Station Antarctica. So Ricky, he's definitely.

ah, look at that. Us Coast Guard from Antarctica. Beautiful. Fantastic.

I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever had one from Antarctica. Here we go. Hey Aussie, not Austrian bloke. I love my videos, an inspiring electrical engineer and he's been watching since I was working out of the garage.

Gee, that was a long time ago In a galaxy, far, far away. Ah, sorry, caps don't look that great on camera. It's like because the lights are up there at an angle. and yeah, poor video blog you're making them put on backwards.

Yeah, All right. Um, it's Ricky. was actually. um, he saw in a previous video Heard that I mentioned I had an antarctic themed bathroom.

Yes, I do. Every actually every room in our house is actually themed. a different, you know, ecosystem. and we've got Antarctic and we've got the Outback and we've got the rainforest.

uh, ensuite bathroom and you know, main bedroom and all sorts of stuff. So yes, we do have an antarctic bathroom. I have to link in some photos here if I've got them here. And yes, he was watching that and he thought, well, he should send something from the Mcmurdo Station in Antarctica And the wind-up Penguin.

hey happy Feet! Beautiful And ah, ran out of Windy juice. Hmm, but yeah, that's that's the best you can find, but that is awesome. Thank you very much Ricky! He loves Fundamentals Friday and he wants to know if I can do more repair videos. Well, maybe, But the thing is, I don't have much luck with bloody repair videos.

you know. I go on ebay and I search for, you know, not working, test gear and stuff like that and get some in and they're They're either trivial repairs or they're beyond economical repair. Like the, um, the dynamic signal Analyzer over there is. People ask me why I don't finish that.

It's it's beyond economical repair. It's just there's so many things wrong with it. It just took out everything on the boards and it's just yeah. it's Br as they call it in the trade.

So yeah, I just don't have a lot of luck with, uh, getting repair stuff on ebay. You know, that actually has a decent amount of stuff where I track it down and you know, aha, find the culprit and do it. It's even some bloody custom, basic thing that's failed, like the uh, Lacroix oscilloscope for example. Still got that in parts here somewhere.

And yeah, it's just can't cop a break on bloody repair videos. Yeah, I'll probably keep trying, but jeez, I don't know. not doing. Oh, look at that.

I'll keep trying though on those sorry you got to show postcards from Antarctica. Geez, I get many from Antarctica. That's fantastic. And yep, big Air Force plane coming in.

Geez, yeah, I'd love to go to Antarctica. That's on my bucket list. Yep, one day check out Mcmurdo Station there. Geez, it's like practically a whole town.

Didn't know it was that big. Unbelievable. Wow. Does it have a pub? Next up, we got one from Rom.

Rom. It's not Ryan. it's Rom. I'll call you Ron.

Ron Gellar. Um, and he's from the United States of America. This is one of these really annoying. oh I can tear it here.

But yeah, one of these annoying, you know, filled with the crap in them that worked. Let's see what Rom has sent me. Julie bro. see this is yeah.

this crap. look, ah ah, breathing that crap in. ah awful. ah okay.

now let's have a look. Looks like yeah, sorry for the uh Julian banjos out there, but uh, is it is a guitar. Oh yeah, damn it. Ah, can I have to vacuum? All right? How does that plug in goes in like that? Where's the end on it? Where's the end? I don't know what you call the end bit on that.

There you go. It's a Fender Mustang Fender Stratocaster, which is of course a famous guitar. And yes, everyone's probably screaming at me. It's one of these stupid rock band, um, game controllery things.

I don't know, I don't play that crap, but uh yeah. and apparently It's got 120 buttons on here. You can play it in expert mode or something and uh yeah, geez, right. I don't know.

Sorry doesn't excite me much. maybe the real thing would. So thanks to everyone who's saying something to the mailbag segment. and yep, we've still got a whole shelf full of stuff, so hopefully we'll have another another one next week.

Catch you next time. Dance. Damn it. Dance.

You.