Had a talk with a old timer in Daytona that made me rethink testing

I was swapping stories with a guy who's been doing avionics since the 80s, and he said something that stuck with me. He told me that modern test equipment is so quiet and clean that it hides a lot of the small glitches we used to catch with older gear. He showed me a waveform on his bench, and compared it to what my new digital analyzer showed, and there was a tiny spike he caught that mine missed completely. It hit me that all these fancy screens and auto-calibrations might be making me lazy about actually listening to the signals. He even said half the time he uses a basic screwdriver probe before busting out the expensive stuff. Now I'm wondering how often I'm missing stuff because I trust the box too much. Has anyone else noticed a big difference between old school troubleshooting and what we do today?

3 comments

3 Comments

jenny_lane1211d ago

Used to think the old guys were just stuck in their ways and scared of new tech. Then I had a bad capacitor on a nav receiver that showed up perfectly on my old Tek scope but looked clean as a whistle on my digital one. Mine was smoothing out the noise before I ever saw it. Now I keep a cheap analog scope on the bench just for quick checks and it's caught stuff my expensive gear missed.

jake74711d ago

Your cheap analog scope probably isn't smoothing out noise with a bad capacitor, it's just showing you the ripple better because it doesn't have digital filtering." Digital scopes hide that kind of stuff by default unless you turn the bandwidth limit off.

daniel_cooper3411d ago

Man that old timer is living in 1987 while we're out here trusting boxes that literally say "auto" on them lol. I had the same reality check when I was chasing a intermittent dropout on a King radio last month, my spectrum analyzer showed nothing but a old analog scope caught this little jitter that looked like a heartbeat monitor. Honestly half the time I feel like we're just calibrating our expensive gear instead of actually troubleshooting. The screwdriver probe thing is real though, I've started using a basic audio probe on power supplies just to hear if the ripple sounds angry.