Hi, folks. Yes, it's me. Finally felt comfortable enough to just settle
down and resubscribe.
Scrounge-2000 was quite a trip. I learned a number of things along the
way, including (though not limited to):
* If you're driving from the Bay Area to Washington, and you want to buy
giant blackberries from the local berry farms to take home, also invest in
a Peltier-effect portable cooler box.
* Don't ever rent a Ford Explorer for a long trip again. The things are
utter gas hogs!
* Pigeons can indeed do "The Splits."
Now, as to what I got... Test equipment and RF-related stuff was my main
emphasis on this trip, and I did succeed pretty significantly in that
regard. Two Wavetek function generators (a 154 and a 178), and a rubidium
frequency standard from Tracor (anyone have the manual for a 308A?).
I didn't do badly in the (classic) computing department either. I snarfed
a pair of Micropolis full-height nine-gig drives at $5/each, an Atlantic
Research 'Interview 7500' datascope for $45, and some non-classic
replacement parts for my main workstation.
I seem to have developed a taste for collecting serial data analyzers. I
now have two from ARC (Interview 4600 and 7500), and a pair from DigiLog. I
wonder what else is out there?
On that note, does anyone have any documentation at all on either of the
Atlantic Research units? I've not had a lot of success finding such.
The crown jewel of this trip has more to do with radio than computers, but
I'll mention it anyway: A Cushman CE-6A service monitor, working
electrically but only fair cosmetically, for $425. For those of you who
know service monitors, this was still quite a deal (and for those that
don't, you can E-mail me and I'd be happy to explain).
The only thing I really needed to do with it was rebuild a kludge some
other tech had designed in to replace the (formerly) 5 MHz OCXO with a 10
MHz version. Said tech had used an ancient 74H101 as a divider, and had
simply stuck the chip in with double-sided foam tape and not taken
advantage of the original octal socket at all. I corrected all the above,
and I'm pleased to say it works just fine.
So, what have I missed? Flame wars? Discovery of a PDP-1? Anything? ;-)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bruce Lane, Owner and head honcho, Blue Feather Technologies
http://www.bluefeathertech.com // E-mail: kyrrin_at_bluefeathertech.com
Amateur Radio: WD6EOS since Dec. '77
"Our science can only describe an object, event, or living thing in our
own human terms. It cannot, in any way, define any of them..."
Received on Sun Jul 23 2000 - 13:31:16 BST