Tacos Digest, Vol 31, Issue 16

Tue Sep 20 22:17:02 CDT 2005

Ian,
Greetings from Kuwait City.

As you know I got bouced out of Baghdad because of health. I was not able to deal with the heat of the place while working on armor. Managment felt I was about to be a 'heat casualty' and that would look bad on the forms.

Life is fairly good here in Kuwait City. Nobody has tried to kill me in over a month. No mortars, no rockets, no car bombs. A plesant change of pace. 

Im working out of Camp Arifjan Kuwait. They have me fixing air conditioner motor controlers and Infra Red weapons sights. 

The AC controlers are fairly exotic. 18k BTU gizmos. They take in any kind of 220 power , and turn it into three phase 61 hz power to run all the electric motors in the air conditioner. There are three big 500 amp darlington dual transistors in this puppy. 

A boost regulator that takes the rectified 220 and kicks it up to 350 vdc, an analog card that runs the output transistors, and a digital card that runs the analog card. So far Ive gotten very good at fixing the analog cards. The digital cards are about as complex as a 1980's pin ball game. 8000 series micro's, and lots of glue chips. The booster uses two big power fets and some control electronics. A lot of power in these things.

Been building a test fixture to work on the digital cards. Our usual test procedure was to open up a case, and have that 350 volt power supply humming right under an elbow! I don't like working like that, one error and flesh vaporizes is not the way I want to do things. This fixture is much quicker and in the end I will be able to check more functions. One of the checks is a current loop sensor we can't test right now. It measures the total DC amps delivered by the boost regulator and shuts down the inverter if that number goes too high.

In pratice, the semiconductors sacrafice them selves in order to protect the fuse. Guess that's because transistors die in micro seconds and fuses die in miliseconds. Life in the fast lane. Did I mention the transistors cost between 145 and 300 bucks per.

Ive found some odd things with these controlers. Like the gold Dale power resistors are not the greatest thing for high voltage. Had one sputter and short due to a flux carbon bridge. Found various parts of the analog card can't take a big transistor failure well. A huge scorch mark is left behind, and one burned a hole through the board. I have to fix everything, so time is not an issue.

The box is a blivit. (Blivit = ten pounds in a five pound container) Enough said I hope.

Kuwait is dead dull in many respects. No beer, can't date the local women, the usual things Islam frowns on are disalowed.

Their idea of a strip club is when you get to see an ankel.

12 hour days don't leave much time for entertainment anyway.

This bit with the manuals, will that cover the HP stuff? If so, you diden't post the web site. Been looking of a manual for my HP3456A mulit meter. It's a neat gizmo. 61/2 digit resoultion, four wire ohms, and an amazing AC true rms converter. What I don't have is an operators manual for the thing, and I don't remember all the 'math' functions.

If you feel inclined, share this with the AMRAD team.

Been exchanging signals with a travel agent in Wales. She has dangeled a three night stay at Portmiriron agan in front of us. I do like that place. Also thinking of trying to bring the dogs with us to Europe for the two weeks. Everything is on the table. Time will tell.

Remember that old tv show called UFO, the Gary and Silvia Anderson one? Ordered it on DVD and have been watching it. Begining to see a trend, yesterdays old shows are todays tin foil hat paranoia.

Keep it safe
Mike in Kuwait

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Today's Topics:

1. Manuals wanted by Agilent (Iain McFadyen)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 13:44:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: Iain McFadyen 
Subject: Manuals wanted by Agilent
To: tacos at amrad.org
Message-ID: <20050920204427.82173.qmail at web61115.mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Some of you may know already that Agilent has done a recent about turn
regarding making their manuals for boatanchors (and I mean that in the nicest
possible way), available to the general public.

Moreover, one person at Agilent (Dave Cunningham) is assigned to retrieving
manuals for products for which Agilent themselves do not have copies. These
manuals, mainly retrieved from enthusiasts such as ourselves, are then made
available on a website operated by Agilent.

Attached (in MS Excel format) is a list of the top 500. It appears that 200 of
these top 500 have been collected so far. Now they are making a second request
to see if they can obtain any of the remaining 300.

If you have such manuals scanned already, Agilent would be very grateful for a
copy. I believe that if no source of a scanned manual is found, Agilent will
gladly borrow a manual, scan it professionally, return the original to the
supplier, and then post the file to the web. 

If you have manuals for these items of test equipment and are willing to make
them available to Agilent (and therefore to the general public) then please
contact Agilent direct at dcunningham at agilent.com .

73

Iain KI4HLV

__________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 
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End of Tacos Digest, Vol 31, Issue 16
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"You are, what you do, when it counts"
The Masso
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