probe slip

this is how they get nickel plated:

I'm waiting on a plumber today, so not at work. But I bought something like these.

I was probing low frequency stuff.

George H.

Resistive probes? There's not much to blow up. The ones that I make myself are good for several-kilovolt pulses at 6 GHz bandwidth. A 950 ohm Caddock axial resistor can dissipate several watts for a while, which works out to around 50 volts RMS.

Resistive probes are much cheaper than fet probes. The several versions of home-made are almost free.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

No. I was talking about the expensive fet probes.

This guy has a blog going, describing his experimenting with dental burs to keep from slipping off test points and to break through conformal coatings:

The blog is 2 years old but can?t tell if he is selling his product yet. Lots of great ideas presented...

I use carbide dental burrs and a Dremel to cut patterns into gold-plated copperclad FR4.

Amazon doesn't want to sell dental burrs to civilians, so I get them from ebay.

A burr would be a bad thing to probe fine-pitch parts. But a really sharp sewing-needle type probe would punch through solder mask to contact a trace.

That's how I have made some in the 80's, worked great. The insulation wasn't shrink tubing but left-over paint from painting my old Citroen

I baked it on. Of course, an MG fan said it should have been British Racing Green. I found sewing needles to be better than scope probe style because they buried in and would never slip. Of course, they'd bury themselves in fingers.