There's far less difference between most "engineers" and "technicians" than universities would like you to think; the dirty little secret in the engineering world though, is that many an "engineer" never actually uses much of any math beyond basic algebra.
It's not just a "normal" raster with the whole thing rotated 90 degrees?
Nice.
I have a 11801B. It has just developed a "TV" type fault, where the left hand 1/2 inch of display is sort of squashed up and flickers.
[...]
Hi Joel,
I think the new Rohde & Schwarz scopes do that :)
They don't do that though.
What they *do* have, probe-wise, is a DVM function to provide an accurate on-screen display of the DC signal level.
They're really nice all round, actually.
Yes, but only in aircraft, not in electronics labs.
I believe the older HP here can. The others could theoretically as well but it's usually locked in firmware and they won't toss you the keys (I've tried, for other reasons). So my Taiwan-engineered scope has the usual bonbon colors.
I've seen old scopes with orange CRTs.
Ah, ok. But I never liked LeCroy scopes even though I met the guy who designed the GUI. And I certainly do not like Windows-based ones, at all.
I've never liked LeCroy since they tried to put me out of business.
John
Our Rio stereo has that. Or rather, had, because the blue section went phfffft after a thunderstorm.
But you need yet another LED in the connector then. My probes are always color-keyed at tip and BNC. Gets expensive. A company that I helped fix something sent me a little souvenir, one of their powerful LED "disco-style" lights. Thou shalt not scope out a gift's value but I wanted to know. Almost fifty bux. Yikes.
You've never seen a Compaq Portable? ;-)
Maybe. IMHO, I more agree with the old two-liner: Q: What do you call a motivated technician? A: An engineer.
I spent most of my time at MIT on the Dean's Other List (special guest of the C.A.P., for the rat-wearers in the audience) because I was far more interested in building instruments than in doing math. And after a whole bunch of years, I've come to agree with Phil. Math lasts a lifetime.
-JMac
... and blushing.
But it's true. Very occascionally do I have to dive deep into math. Most of the stuff is back of the envelope, literally.
Nothing better than to learn forgiveness :-)
Seriously. It took me almost the first half of my life to understand that concept.
I toughed out military boot camp alright but university was something else. There were professors priding themselves that they "weeded out"
80% again this time. Some of it was grueling and yeah, we were also unprepared. Some folks needed psychlogical drugs. The stuff that is nowadays Zoloft et cetera, not sure how they are called. Young students got ulcers, and all that. But we didn't have suicide attempts AFAIR, like there was in boot camps.He was right.
Nowadays you almost have to because there is stuff where you just don't have the lab equipment for because it's outrageously expensive.
Hey, I got mine new for $49.95 plus tax, from the old Tower Bookstore in Sacramento, the price tag is still on it.
$50 or $100, doesn't matter. For any student who is serious about electronics AoE is definitely worth bussing tables for a week, and then the dough will be there to just buy it.
Nowadays, with Spice and matlab and all sorts of languages and utilities, we "do" less math than we used to. But understanding the math - filters, signal processing, transforms, spectra, noise, modulation, convolution - is still critical. And engineers are (somewhat) more likely to know this stuff than techs. Physics helps a lot, too: electromagnetics, conservation principles, optics, thermodynamics, a little quantum mechanics, materials science, some semiconductor theory. Once you know what the principles and the boundaries are, there are lots of ways to get the numbers.
I get a lot of mileage out of conservation of energy, the Sampling Theorem, and some basic signal processing theory, even if I don't often fill pages with calculus.
I did take an actual integral some years back, to verify a switching fet's power dissipation. But the result was only a little better than a quick linear eyeball approximation. Once things get nonlinear, as they usually do, you may as well simulate.
John
Or forgetting. It's easier and works just as well.
John
I had a Compaq Laptop but that glowed white :-)
When better women are made, MIT men will make them?
More likely worried that their own inadequacies vis-à-vis the outside world would be exposed.
When Radcliffe was separate from Harvard, a bunch of us went up to Ha-a-a-arvard Squa-a-a-are, and used lye to write that in the Radcliffe dormitory grass :-) ...Jim Thompson
Yeah, it's pretty common for car stereos to be able to sync the display color of their buttons with their screen these days.
True, but if you're Tek, Agilent, or Lecroy, there's so much margin in their probes that an additional LED would be nothing.
Yep, the tried-and-true method there works just fine. But those marketing guys need some sort of bell, light, or whistle to impress the iPod generation with. :-)
---Joel
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