Techs: What's on your Shelf of Weird Things?

I see LOTS of flat-packs do this.

Mark Z.

The best transistor story I ever heard was from Sam's predecessor Jack Darr. There was an uncontrollable hum in a TV's sound that developed when the case was removed. The sound altered volume when the technician's hand was moved nearby. Turns out that an audio transistor's black epoxy case wasn't black, but translucent brown; the carbon black hadn't been mixed properly at the factory. The transistor junction is light-sensitive, and the 120Hz flicker from the shop's lamps was reaching it through the translucent epoxy case.

M Kinsler

Sam Goldwasser wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@red.seas.upenn.edu:

Gas sensor?

You place a (somewhat hight) voltage on the terminals, ands as the composition of the gas changes, so does its electrical properties, which are senses by a circuit connected to the probes.

Sam Goldwasser wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@red.seas.upenn.edu:

Vacuum capacitor? [when installed in a vacuum chamber], perhaps part of an electrode assembly from a mass spectrometer of some kind.

Perhaps the inner cylinder is heated by current between a couple of the pins and acts as an electron gun or acts to inject a sample(by heating it) into an instrument.

--
bz    	73 de N5BZ k

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an 
infinite set.

bz+ser@ch100-5.chem.lsu.edu   remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap

It would be kind of hard to seal it. You can't see it in the photo, but there's a hole in the end of the outer cylinder, probably the others as well. Those pointy legs must be to stick into something. But what? :)

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