Driver to drive?

[Phil Allison]

tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

** See page 20 of the pdf.

Page 20 of a 12 page pdf?

** Should be "see figure 20".

You are so full of shit.


It had 3 outputs, sine square & triangle. At some frequencies one output looked more like one of the others should, and the others were just a mess.


** Meaningless bollocks.

Your only area of expertise.

Baseless abuse

** Thoroughly fact based, fair comment.

You are a prize bullshit artist and nasty piece of work to boot.



..... Phil

NT

 

[Phil Allison]

tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

It's certainly way off. Domestic valve gear typically runs a couple of
decades before needing a new valve.


** More meaningless bollocks.

Valves have a useful life of only a few thousand hours - less if abused.

horse crap. I've run them way longer.

** Meaningless crap.

You are using fake facts.

The only kind you ever have.



..... Phil

 

On Thursday, 16 March 2017 02:23:48 UTC, Phil Allison wrote:

tabby wrote:




** See page 20 of the pdf.

Page 20 of a 12 page pdf?


** Should be "see figure 20".

Mfr admits to 11% distortion. We got way worse.

You are so full of shit.


It had 3 outputs, sine square & triangle. At some frequencies one output looked more like one of the others should, and the others were just a mess.


** Meaningless bollocks.

Your only area of expertise.

Baseless abuse


** Thoroughly fact based, fair comment.

You are a prize bullshit artist

A sensible person would ask why might it have produced so much distortion. A sensible person might ask if I'm likely to get the time to find it, repair it & demonstrate its problem.

> and nasty piece of work to boot.

Oh. I suspect quite a lot of people think that one more fits you. It doesn't fit me. You think it does, but know not a lot about my life.

If you have electronics knowledge to contribute, great. But when it comes to stupid & abusive comments, why bother.


NT

 

[Phil Allison]

tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

** Should be "see figure 20".

Mfr admits to 11% distortion.

** Blatant lie.

You really are a piece of shit.

** Thoroughly fact based, fair comment.

You are a prize bullshit artist

A sensible person would ask why might it have produced so much distortion.

** Nope.

Asking why before you have the facts straight is pure fuckwittery.

Your one and only talent.


Piss off, arsehole.



..... Phil

 

On Thursday, 16 March 2017 02:26:46 UTC, Phil Allison wrote:

tabby wrote:



It's certainly way off. Domestic valve gear typically runs a couple of
decades before needing a new valve.


** More meaningless bollocks.

Valves have a useful life of only a few thousand hours - less if abused.

horse crap. I've run them way longer.



** Meaningless crap.

No, it has a definite meaning. I've run valve kit for years without valve failure.

You are using fake facts.

The only kind you ever have.

Well here's the first random search result
http://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showthread.php?t=38181&page=2
.... it doesn't agree with you either.

Then you could apply a basic common sense sanity check. Filament lamps run around 1000hrs, which is what bright emitters were. They were run at lower temperature to prolong life, so you'd expect a few thousand hours or thereabout. Dull valve emitters managed 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more than bright. Fluoresent tube emitters managed 10k hours decades ago. TV tubes ran fine for a decade or so left on all day every day.

But hey, maybe there's a large number of us that share the delusion of running valve gear on a heavy use basis for many years and having very few failures. Or... just maybe... your knowledge isn't quite as thorough as you think.

Come back with some real facts. And if we're really lucky, a sensible attitude.


NT

 

[Phil Allison]

whit3rd wrote:

On Tuesday, March 14, 2017 at 9:18:38 PM UTC-7, Bill Bowden wrote:
Which is a better design. Suppose you have a 6 inch length of PVC pipe with
numerous turns of wire that has an inductance of say 200uH. Now suppose you
use the same (6 inch) piece of PVC with a ferrite rod in the core ...

There's no comparison.

** You have **over-snpped** and ruined the OP's question.

That's because the two antenna designs have
completely different impedances,

** The ferrite one will have a higher Q, but similar impedance.



...... Phil

 

[Phil Allison]

upsid...@downunder.com wrote:

The gain ( = directivity x efficiency) for a typical loopstick is
very bad in the order of -60 to -80 dB,

** Compared to what ???

A half wave antenna 150 meters long?

But thanks to the extremely high band noise at LF and MF,
you still get usable SNR with such designs.

** This is not right.

Whatever the inherent atmospheric noise at MF, the signal from the transmitter can over-ride it.

AM does not have inherently bad s/n unless you are DXing.

I have a hi-fi AM tuner that coupled with small frame antenna ( 40x40 cm) is capable of FM like results from good, local broadcasts.

It uses just 2 small valves.



..... Phil

 

On Wed, 15 Mar 2017 06:35:37 -0700 (PDT), makolber@yahoo.com wrote:

So adding a material with mu(rel) of 4.0 will cut the number of turns in
half and increase the output voltage by 2. This doesn't include an
improvement in the resistive losses of the coil. The Q of the coil will
be reduced as the inductance drops linearly, but the resistance goes
down by the square root of the permeability.

--

Rick C

And in the AM broadcast band, the SNR is usually not determined by the radio but rather by the atmospheric noise and interference form other stations,,,, so even though you may build an antenna that puts out more "volts" it will not be helpful for picking up weaker signals.

M

The gain ( = directivity x efficiency) for a typical loopstick is
very bad in the order of -60 to -80 dB, due to the extremely low
efficiency. But thanks to the extremely high band noise at LF and MF,
you still get usable SNR with such designs.

 

[rickman]

On 3/16/2017 1:52 AM, whit3rd wrote:

On Tuesday, March 14, 2017 at 9:18:38 PM UTC-7, Bill Bowden wrote:
Which is a better design. Suppose you have a 6 inch length of PVC pipe with
numerous turns of wire that has an inductance of say 200uH. Now suppose you
use the same (6 inch) piece of PVC with a ferrite rod in the core ...

There's no comparison. That's because the two antenna designs have
completely different impedances, and must feed entirely different
frontend RF amps. At some frequency, with some particular input
gain stage, you can't just swap those two antennas: you need to redesign
the next stage as well.

Or you simply couple the antenna to the receiver appropriately.

--

Rick C

 

[Martin Brown]

On 15/03/2017 12:39, tabbypurr@gmail.com wrote:

On Wednesday, 15 March 2017 12:10:36 UTC, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/03/2017 13:58, tabbypurr wrote:
On Tuesday, 14 March 2017 09:22:05 UTC, Martin Brown wrote:

There used to be old school analogue function generator chips
that made a triangle wave and then applied diode shaping to get
a pseudo-sine wave. HP made one design implementation that was
surprisingly good. Intersils 8038 was the poor mans alternative
for DIY.

http://www.intersil.com/content/dam/intersil/documents/icl8/icl8038.pdf




I built one of those decades ago. What a car crash. The wave forms
were hopeless. I don't remember the details to know why, I
presume the problem was the 8038 though.

It was never anything like as good as a Wein bridge sine wave but
it was good for about 0.5% THD if you trimmed it properly. I
suspect manufacturing tolerances made it inconsistent batch to
batch.

Cute chip in its day, but that was a long time ago.

I doubt it managed 50%, let alone 0.5%. It had 3 outputs, sine square
& triangle. At some frequencies one output looked more like one of
the others should, and the others were just a mess. It was dire, and

I built one a long time ago. I found it in my parents attic whilst
clearing the house recently. I might test it to see how good/bad it is
next time I have chance. You have inspired me not to just throw it out.

yes I followed the advised circuit. It might manage 0.5% at some
frequency, but as a sig gen it was a real failure. If I ever get the
time I'll look at it again one day, it's on a shelf somewhere.

It was fine as a rough sine wave over the audio range as long as you
were not trying to measure hifi amplifier distortion. The tweak in fig 4
would trim THD to <1% over most of the audio range at least it did for
me. Symmetry of the triangle waveform was essential to minimising THD -
most of the errors did not come from the sine shaping network.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

On Friday, March 17, 2017 at 1:29:43 AM UTC+11, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
"Procedure" tomorrow (Wednesday) at 11:00AM:

Down the throat with a scope, check out the stomach, then into the
small intestine, use side-looking ultrasound on the end of the probe
(didn't know such a thing existed)

Sure, they found the Titanic with something similar.

Not exactly. Jim may be overweight, but he isn't large enough to accommodate a towed side-looking sonar array. Diagnostic sonar is all near-field array stuff, and the Titanic was found with an array that looked at the far-field.

<snip>

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[George Herold]

On Thursday, March 16, 2017 at 11:20:16 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 15 Mar 2017 18:10:31 -0700 (PDT), Phil Allison
pallison49@gmail.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:


The people who have been making radios for close to a century have
probably optimized the design.

Optimized for cost to sales ratio, certainly, but maybe not for the best
performance to size ratio.


** The latter is exactly what a ferrite antenna is optimised for.


In the early days of transistor radios, size was limited and gain was
expensive, so it was worth some ferrite to get more RF input power.
Gain is now so cheap that an air core antenna might be OK.



** Really ?

Try posting an idea that is not full of ambiguities.


... Phil


Maybe I should have used shorter words?

I've got an AM radio that came with an air core antenna.
(1990's vintage)
~4" (10 cm) squarish loop. Not sure how many turns.
Works fine.

George H.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Martin Brown]

On 15/03/2017 16:36, rickman wrote:

On 3/15/2017 8:46 AM, tabbypurr@gmail.com wrote:
On Tuesday, 14 March 2017 23:57:20 UTC, rickman wrote:
On 3/13/2017 3:23 PM, oldschool@tubes.com wrote:
On Mon, 13 Mar 2017 09:27:50 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com
wrote:

Thanks to all who replied. I read that WIkipedia article, which
explained what these things are, (even though that article was like
reading a legal manual).

Wikipedia often is written by those with a certain level of elitism
rather than an interest in explaining topics to all who wish to learn.
It is not uncommon for a technical article to be written at such a high
level that a reader needs much more than just a casual understanding of
the topic.

In my opinion, this is one of the ways Wikipedia has failed.

Surely that beats a dumbed down retardopedia. Some topics just aren't
that simple. There's always the simple-wiki articles aimed more at
children. Wiki has its problems, but I'm not convinced that is one of
them.

I may not be an expert in various areas of electronics and computers,
but I am far from a novice. There are various electronics related pages
on Wikipedia that I can't read without going to the references and
studying. That is ridiculous.

Why do you think it is ridiculous. If you dip into a book chosen at
random and find a complicated equation that describes reality it isn't
the fault of the book that you don't understand what is written there.

When only the experts in a field can even read and understand an
encyclopedia entry I'm not sure that's any better than a "retardopedia".
It essentially becomes the same thing, a web page that conveys very
little information to very few people.

It requires you to actually work at reading the more complex content by
looking up the references. I find that in the technical sphere there is
little to criticise in Wiki there are usually decent references both to
prior art and more basic information with the core article usually
written at about the same level as a university textbook. A few links
are broken at any given time but Wayback will often still get them.

The same is not true for Wiki entries about politicians and public
figures which variously get hacked by zealots to say completely insane
things at times.

I think the editors end up being full of themselves trying to be
"expert" or "professional". In the end they become irrelevant.

Why do you want to denigrate experts at every opportunity?
They are freely sharing their knowledge for the public good.

If you don't like what they have written you are not forced to use it.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

On Thursday, 16 March 2017 05:24:13 UTC, Phil Allison wrote:

tabb...is a criminal lunatic and a liar




** Must be a delusion - cos it contradicts the experience of all others.

Or just plain old bullshit made up by valve freaks.


It's the collective experience of far more people than you.


** No it's not - you pathetic lying POS.



I told you to fuck off.

Do so or I will hound you off this NG.



You aren't capable of it.


** Fact is, I am very good at it and very successful.



Anyone can look at that figure 20 and see the claimed 11% distortion
plain as day.


** And they can see you posted a MASSIVE LIE as well.

You are a one sad & sorry fuckwit without a single shred of decency in you.

Lying on a technical NG is incredibly moronic.

Folk like you are pox on the face of the earth.

Drop dead.



.... Phil

Mr Allison is plainly nuttier than I expected.
http://www.intersil.com/content/dam/intersil/documents/icl8/icl8038.pdf
Figure 20 on p10 plain as day shows upto 11% distortion on sine waves, and figure 18 admits upto 10% linearity on triangle waves. What sort of loon sits there lying on something so trivial for every reader to go see. What a - I don't know what he is. Just a nut.


NT

 

[amdx]

On 3/16/2017 2:10 AM, Phil Allison wrote:

whit3rd wrote:

On Tuesday, March 14, 2017 at 9:18:38 PM UTC-7, Bill Bowden wrote:
Which is a better design. Suppose you have a 6 inch length of PVC pipe with
numerous turns of wire that has an inductance of say 200uH. Now suppose you
use the same (6 inch) piece of PVC with a ferrite rod in the core ...

There's no comparison.


** You have **over-snpped** and ruined the OP's question.

That's because the two antenna designs have
completely different impedances,

** The ferrite one will have a higher Q, but similar impedance.



..... Phil

I'll disagree with you on that Phil, I recently built 5 coils
using 6" polystyrene pipe coupler as a form. I wound them with 660/46
wire with spacing's of 11 Turns Per Inch, 12 TPI, 13 TPI, 14 TPI and 15
TPI. All coils were between 232uh and 237uh.
10 TPI, 11 TPI and 12 TPI were pretty close, with Q at 500kHz of 1250,
peaking at about 750kHz with a Q of 1450 and dropping to 950 at 1600kHz.
I used a Boonton 260A Q meter and averaged 5 tests, I'll give the
caveat that high Q's are elusive to measure.
Your standard 61 material is to lossy to get this high, there is some
lower loss material coming out of China that is performing well. The
best I ever got with a #61 material was 550 Q.
Now to defeat my argument, a Chinese radio amateur made a rod with 26
toroids with a Teflon core and Teflon spacers and two parallel 660/46
litz wires, measured peak Q just over 1812.
Then another another duplicated his experiment and got peak Q of 2026.
The material is coming from China and is R40C1.
Details here,
> http://theradioboard.com/rb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7058

Proving at least some of the human race, has a lot of free time.

Mikek
Helmet and flak jacket in place.


---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

Jim Thompson wrote:

"Procedure" tomorrow (Wednesday) at 11:00AM:

Down the throat with a scope, check out the stomach, then into the
small intestine, use side-looking ultrasound on the end of the probe
(didn't know such a thing existed)

Sure, they found the Titanic with something similar.

to examine the common pancreas/bile
duct, go up it with a wire, then thread a balloon up that wire,
inflate and decimate the stones, then go on up and examine the gall
bladder.

Possible later procedure, after the nauseous, tiredness, yellowness
abates, go in thru an incision and remove the gall bladder.

Such fun >:-}

That's a "procedure" and a hydrogen bomb is a "device."


> If I don't show up in a day or too...

Then you'll be back a few days later I'm sure.




---
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
http://www.avg.com

 

[Bill Beaty]

> Which one would capture the most signal at the AM Broadcast frequencies

Is your real question , how do we optimize electrically-small 500KHz loop antennas?



First, for electrically-small resonant antennas, increasing the Q will both narrow the bandwidth as well as increasing the total received microwatts. Between ferrite versus air-core loops, which one has more loss-ohms (including ferrite losses, tuning capacitor slider resistance)?

Second, PHYSICAL SIZE makes a big difference. Wind your air-core antenna as a hoop-style, 5ft diameter! Or, use a 5ft ferrite rod with the windings in the center. Both are roughly equivalent (where ideally you'd use 1/2 wavelength, 300 meters @500Khz, not 5ft.)

 

[John Larkin]

On Wed, 15 Mar 2017 18:10:31 -0700 (PDT), Phil Allison
<pallison49@gmail.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:


The people who have been making radios for close to a century have
probably optimized the design.

Optimized for cost to sales ratio, certainly, but maybe not for the best
performance to size ratio.


** The latter is exactly what a ferrite antenna is optimised for.


In the early days of transistor radios, size was limited and gain was
expensive, so it was worth some ferrite to get more RF input power.
Gain is now so cheap that an air core antenna might be OK.



** Really ?

Try posting an idea that is not full of ambiguities.


... Phil

Maybe I should have used shorter words?


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[rickman]

On 3/16/2017 8:52 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 15/03/2017 16:36, rickman wrote:
On 3/15/2017 8:46 AM, tabbypurr@gmail.com wrote:
On Tuesday, 14 March 2017 23:57:20 UTC, rickman wrote:
On 3/13/2017 3:23 PM, oldschool@tubes.com wrote:
On Mon, 13 Mar 2017 09:27:50 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com
wrote:

Thanks to all who replied. I read that WIkipedia article, which
explained what these things are, (even though that article was like
reading a legal manual).

Wikipedia often is written by those with a certain level of elitism
rather than an interest in explaining topics to all who wish to learn.
It is not uncommon for a technical article to be written at such a high
level that a reader needs much more than just a casual understanding of
the topic.

In my opinion, this is one of the ways Wikipedia has failed.

Surely that beats a dumbed down retardopedia. Some topics just aren't
that simple. There's always the simple-wiki articles aimed more at
children. Wiki has its problems, but I'm not convinced that is one of
them.

I may not be an expert in various areas of electronics and computers,
but I am far from a novice. There are various electronics related pages
on Wikipedia that I can't read without going to the references and
studying. That is ridiculous.

Why do you think it is ridiculous. If you dip into a book chosen at
random and find a complicated equation that describes reality it isn't
the fault of the book that you don't understand what is written there.

If someone experienced in the field has to do research just to read the
article, how widely read can it be? Wikipedia is supposed to be a
resource for a wide range of audiences, not a college level text book.

When only the experts in a field can even read and understand an
encyclopedia entry I'm not sure that's any better than a "retardopedia".
It essentially becomes the same thing, a web page that conveys very
little information to very few people.

It requires you to actually work at reading the more complex content by
looking up the references. I find that in the technical sphere there is
little to criticise in Wiki there are usually decent references both to
prior art and more basic information with the core article usually
written at about the same level as a university textbook. A few links
are broken at any given time but Wayback will often still get them.

I am saying that is a problem. But it depends on the level of
university textbook. Freshman level intro would be appropriate for most
material rather than graduate level which I have seen.

The same is not true for Wiki entries about politicians and public
figures which variously get hacked by zealots to say completely insane
things at times.

I think the editors end up being full of themselves trying to be
"expert" or "professional". In the end they become irrelevant.

Why do you want to denigrate experts at every opportunity?
They are freely sharing their knowledge for the public good.

"Every opportunity"??? Lol.

If someone wishes to communicate, they need to consider the audience.
Targeting an encyclopedia to advanced college level is not "sharing"
knowledge with very many, which is my point.


> If you don't like what they have written you are not forced to use it.

Yes, the "America, love it or leave it" argument... Thanks for sharing.

--

Rick C

 

[Bill Beaty]

On Monday, March 13, 2017 at 1:28:39 AM UTC-7, olds...@tubes.com wrote:

I've been looking into buying an Audio Generator (Sine and Square Wave).
I mainly want this to run thru an amplifier to listen to the frequency
repsonse of the amp and speakers. Nothing very scientific, just to see
what these amps and speakers can do.... And on occasion to inject an
audio signal into amp sections to dee if the audio is passing that
stage.

Originally I was looking at some of the old tube gear, such as the Eico
model 377. I also looked at the Heathkit IG-18 a transistorized version
from the 70s. Because I like that old test gear, I'd be happy to get
either of these, or another similar. Both of these are Sine and Suqare
Wave. But what I am finding is the prices combined with high S+H fees,
make these things very costly, and I have not found any of them which
claim to work. Sold as-is, for parts or repair. So, I may end up paying
$60 or more and getting something that dont work, likely needs new caps,
and so on..... If they were $25 or less, I'd take a chance, but not for
that kind of money.

My search on ebay lead me to something called a "Function Generator".
What the heck is that??? And also called a DDS device. (I have no clue
what DDS means). But I carefully looked at this NEW device, sold without
a box (case), but only needs a power module and test leads. They sell
for around $14 from China, but since I dont care to order from China,
I'll probably have to hunt one down from the US, and pay around $5 or
$10 more. But that's ok. These have both the Sine and Square wave, as
well as Triangle wave (what does that sound like?).

While I prefer the older stuff, for around $20 a cheap wal-wart, and a
little work putting it into a box, I'd probably buy one of these, *IF*
it will do what I need..... I have read all the info on the ebay pages,
but I am not 100% sure that this is a modern replacement for the old
audio generators. One nice thing, is that they will show the exact
frequency on the digital readout.

IS THIS WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR?
Is something like this made to really be used, or is it just another toy
that does little and fails in a few months?

And can something like this work to test tube amps, without blowing up
from the high voltages in tube gear?

One last thing that has me puzzled. There are two BNC connectors. One is
labeled DDS, tho other is HS.

I found this in the description.
DDS frequency range: 1Hz-65534Hz, high-speed frequency (HS) output up to
8MHz.

I dont understand how or what the high speed feature does. Why would an
audio frequency be or need "high speed"? And what is the point for this
device to go above 20,000 cps, since we cant hear that anyhow? Going up
to 8MHZ seens senseless, unless this also serves as a RF signal
generator.

Here is the ebay URL.

http://tinyurl.com/h5celuc

Wavetek 145 is a really nice oldschool signal generator.

Sine/sq/triangle, plus sawtooth and pulses. Also freq and amplitude modulated (makes some crazy raygun sounds.) Also frequency-sweep, and with a scope, you can see an amplifier's spectrum.