fav gear...

What is your favorite piece of equipment to use?

in fact i have two, first off is my oscilloscope which since buying it a while back, i don't know how i ever managed without it, it's a basic CRT 2 channel 30Mhz one but i have done some small signal projects that simply could not have been done without it, tracing the signal through the circuit and locating the hotspots was fab.

My second fav has to be my little pocket sized Analogue multimeter, i loved setting it on the Ω range and watching the needle fly across the face of the meter as it showed me where i hadn't completely broke the copper track on my strip board with the twist drill, or worse still, had forgotten to make a break at all where i needed to, the digi meter just doesn't give me the same satisfaction for some reason.

My problem is that i get right near the end of construction and rush it so i can get power into the thing and see it work lol

Neil.

Among other gear, the two pieces I use the most are a Tek 475 scope and a Saleae Logic analyzer.

I got a nifty little shirt-pocket "Mini DSO" oscilloscope off ebay for $40 (new, with a probe) and it has been handy to slip it into a pocket on the off chance I might need it when I go to look at a machine on the factory floor. Then I can use the USB jack (which also recharges it) to upload the images of the messed-up signals into email and send them along with my pontifications on how the programmers managed to screw up my nice electronics again.

What is your favorite piece of equipment to use?

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To state the really obvious, it depends what I am doing at the time!

But as for the question

i don't know how i ever managed without it

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that probably applies to most things at one time ot another.

Having been into radio/electronics as a hobby for about 50 years, it is amazing how much messing about you have to do when you dont have the ideal bit of test equipment to hand.

One example sticks in the mind, I was trying to build a crystal calibrator, a device for generating accurate frequencies for setting the calibration of shortwave receivers.
I had a 100khz crystal oscillator which worked well, but wanted to extend it to generate signals at 25 and 10khz, using 7490 TTL dividers.
It worked, sort of, but would give signals at 50khz intervals instead of 25, and 20 khz instead of 10khz. I gave up on it.

Some years later after I had an oscilloscope, I re-visited the thing and found the problem in an instant. The problem was not with the divider chips, where I had been giving all my attention, but the crystal oscillator.
The oscillator output was distorted in a way that effectively gave a 200khz output rather than 100khz. Listening on a receiver, there were signals every 100khz, but in the time domain it was a 200khz signal and the 7490s switched on the 200khz glitch!

One thing that I have noticed over the years is that simple bits of equipment which at the time were in the category of "how did I manage with out it?" are superceeded and remain unused as more sophisticated equipment comes along.

Example, in the early 1970s I built a GDO (Grid Dip Oscillator, google it if you dont know what it is), a really usefull bit of kit for setting up tuned circuits and finding the frequency of an oscillator.
But since then, a spectrum analyser and tracking generator can do the same thing and much more. The GDO just sits in its box gathering dust.

JimB

But doesn't it make you feel good when you fix something using a piece of gear you made yourself? doesn't it make you beam with pride and phone up your friends to boast lol

it would me!

I guess i'm old school in some ways and often try to do tasks as i would have in the 80's instead of adopting the 'new and improved method', mainly co's i like to reminisce about the days when i first started electronics, such an exciting time.

Neil.

I wish I still had a good analogue multimeter; I keep hoping a well-cared-for Simpson would fall into my hands. I like digital for most things, but there are times when an analogue meter can show you things that otherwise wouldn't show up on a regular digital meter (that is, an el-cheapo one; I'm sure an expensive Fluke could find, say, a ripple voltage on a DC trace - with an analog meter, you could see the needle wiggle a bit). I'm just glad i know how to read and use the older equipment (learned at a tech school in 1991-2; we used Simpson meters and old Tek 25 MHz 2-channel scopes - I at least now have a couple of nice scopes, one Tek, one Fluke - the Fluke is also a Combiscope - combined analog and digital dual trace).