Triax Schmiax

In which I ponder a weird connector…

Sony HSC-300 camera… presenting with loss of power and/or signal whenever the swivel spigot on the side is rotated. The part was ordered… $835 and it took two weeks to ship… Yowza. I’m clearly in the wrong business.

And there it is. $835.

At first I was really perplexed wondering how this not even coaxial set of wires carries HD-SDI, but… it’s not necessarily HD-SDI. I’m not really sure what it is. It’s 170vdc power, and some flavor of bidirectional RF something or other that goes to the CCU and also carries prompter and return video to the viewfinder and serial data. Ok then.

The old part was really munched.

All in all not a hard replacement, but damn that parts cost!!! Wow. Well, I don’t have to buy it myself (this isn’t South Florida!) so bite me. Ha.

Oops I tripped and fell in the Crayola 72 box

I just keep getting more colorful and I freaking love it.

First off, my last adventure with hair colors. I decided to leave the dark roots and……

It’s glorious.

I’ve still got the nice UV glow but really pretty jewel colors where it went over my dark and silver roots. YES.

Smoky purple and blue tones

Uh oh, I feel asleep on a circuit board and got traces on my face!

…. And then I got this badass palette from Glamlite and it’s REALLY nice. This is like, the kind of thing I absolutely should have had as a baby bat 😀

The bright pink is from this neon colors palette I got at Five Below.

And it all looks pretty cool even behind my tinted glasses :3

And that’s me without any makeup but with a beat to hell dummy load (I don’t trust it).

And that was my face when I was waiting for the Glamlite palette to arrive

You know what, just yeet these with extreme prejudice

This WAS a rubber stick on cushion. These are often found as feet on electronic equipment. I actually don’t know why it was ever in there.

It didn’t stop there and ran all the way down the chassis. The first sign of trouble was that I went to pull the scope out of its housing and it just stayed stuck, but then came out with a big SCHLORP sound.

I’ve begun ripping these rubber cushions off my older electronic gear and replacing them with sticky back felt feet if necessary. I wonder if there are silicone rubber equivalents? The silicone rubber keypad on this oscilloscope still works fine despite being made in the early 1990s but that superfluous cushion had to go before. I’m glad I got it before it oozed right out the holes in the back.

As nasty as this would be I’d rather soak in that substance than the contents of the Tesla Dumpster Pool

On the hunt again

Last week we had a horribly long engineering staff meeting that basically pointed out to me that we’re all destined to be burned out like our damn transmission line in the coming months. I’m quite done with this. We were promised there’d be big improvements and then saw them yanked away and replaced with the promise of enjoying what will eventually degrade into “Just In Time Scheduling“. Yeah, how about no.

Spunk Trumpet

That being said, I’m gonna be exploring other career opportunities with companies that don’t treat their mission critical staff like rodents.

Old UPN network lighting gobo

I had such high hopes for this company. It was great…. three mergers, four reductions in force, and one massive consolidation of HR and talent acquisition later. Now it’s just a slow burn of crushing cheapness and presumably, tax writeoffs of everything that doesn’t just get asset stripped.

Anyone interested in having a rather silly but talented engineer come work for them? I have 20 years experience in the field, including TV, FM and AM radio. I’d post a full resume here but I don’t exactly want everyone’s bots to come knocking yet. Also, I shitpost a lot. Maybe I need to write up a public resume in the form of a shitpost. That’d fool all the bots and give me the ability to sneak in cat pictures.

Meanwhile, here’s a sleepy kitty.

UwU I tell you hwat.

Of cats, glowy things, and tri-color foaming wax:

Hmm, yes, this is a fine box of kitteh

Pat the tortie tush!

While everyone got spooky for the office Halloween party I just pretty much came as my true usual self. Our CPR instructor called me Sailor Moon and I will be amused by this FOREVER. Spooky Cat just because.


Slightly less glowy “but I can actually see stuff this way” version

 

 

 

 

And a strange car wash:

TROGDOR THE 75 OHM BURNINATOR!!!

So finally all the pieces fell into place and we were able to discover that the issue we had with high VSWR was simply that we were visited by —-

Only consummate V’s will be used within this post as a result.

In all seriousness, this was an effect of climate change!

So, remember this, where the line was sweep tested and a big raunchy fault showed up at 1600 feet?

Here’s the fault:

 

Yeah, um, this got a little bit hot.

The remains of the inner sections of the line, an insulator that slumped and shrank all weird, and a mostly vaporized “bullet” connector. Here’s a figure of what one would look like if it was not… burninated….

Well, now that’s fixed, but the tower crew found a lot of debris in the line at multiple levels and issues with the hangers. One had a bad case of Spring Fever and some others had alignment problems that kept them from sliding their full range of motion.

NOOOOOOO SPRINGS

This never presented a problem in 25 years of the line being in service…. until climate change threw us a RECORD HIGH heat wave. 118 degrees for several days… the line had never experienced heat that severe, and between that and the hanger misalignment, it caused sections of it to get kinked and that eventually broke the bullet somehow and blew everything up. The failure actually occurred early in the morning after the record heat wave broke and everything began to shrink back into its normal sizes.

 

Well that was a wild ride.

Now let me explain why I embarassingly fell asleep on the job while getting the transmitter back in order:

This is the most annoying and frustrating interface, I swear. In each of the transmitter cabinets, there are two Power Blocks. Each Power Block (PB) has a Phase and Gain module which is the intermediate power amplifier to drive the other amps in the PB, but instead of it just having three amp pallets in it, it has one preamp module that lets you, well, adjust the Phase and Gain.
On the old Space Station Toilet it had software controlled adjustments in each of its Intermediate Power Amplifiers (IPA) but also a set of manual trombone-slide phase adjusters that worked by being a variable length line in the RF path to it. They were pretty quick and easy to adjust.

This is not. This is very very much not. The way it works is you vary the step size by entering a number in that box, check or uncheck which PBs you want the adjustment to affect, then click the + or – buttons.

The result of your adjustment is reflected by the amount of power dissipated in the combiner reject loads, RL1, RL3, and RL2. RL1 / 3 are the combiners inside each of the cabinets between the two power blocks. RL2 is the one external to the cabinet sitting on top that merges it together. Basically, you want to balance RL1 / RL3 as well as possible, then continue balancing to get the RL2 power to minimum. Finally, in the case of this transmitter since it’s basically two ULXT’s externally combined, you pull up the interface to the Dualtran controller, watch the final combiner reject load power in there, and balance the two sides.

It is a very very very very tedious and slow process, complicated further by the fact that the web interfaces all time out every five minutes and make you log back in, even if you were actively in the process of making an adjustment! Click, click, click, click, BARF. I got to a point where I remember looking at the reject load power and wondering, hey, is that number of millivolts on the meter channel going up or down? I forgot what it just was a second ago, uh…..

Next thing I knew I was looking at the towers from a houseboat on the Sacramento River. Cassie was curled up on my lap and I found myself wondering how we got there and hoping I didn’t have to drive down there because she hates the car. She seemed very content though. I had no idea how I’d gotten there but I figured since it was so nice I shouldn’t really question it. There was a nice cool breeze coming through the windows and birds chirping in the distance. Cassie was watching them intently with her little tail twitching and she was doing the adorable little feline ekekekekekekek back at them.

Then I was just rudely dumped back into the reality that I was still sitting in front of that dumb web interface at the transmitter site. HOW ABSOLUTE DARE? That was so nice! Oh well.

Peace, Love, Shitposting

It me:

Pumpkin Foreman
Better get in while the $600 general admission tickets last
FoNoGo
Cassie action shot
Neat old drinking fountain in the Coloma Community Center
Cool architectural design, but miss me with that colonizer scum.
Happy marmalade colored bebby

I have yet to get a picture of this because they just both get up, but lately Gingy and Scrappy have been curling up there like a little yin – yang of floofle. So precious.

(⁠◕ ◕⁠)

The SNG truck that wants to try our patience— it just doesn’t wanna finish running all the emissions monitors so it can get a smog check. Supposedly it *only* needs to be driven 400 more miles. Uhhhhhhhhh.

Eisai haramasukoi.

I just don’t know what else to say. This is clearly the dance phenomenon of the century.

…. Whatever is going on here, it’s the beautiful handiwork of the same WiSP that created this massive fire hazard. They have one tech who maintains their stuff down south here, and his work is actually quite good. Then they have, uh, the goddess of chaos herself or something I don’t even know. Hail Eris!!!