In article , NY wrote:
"T i m" wrote in message
...

But then that may have been money down the drain if the problem was a
faulty charging circuit or a faulty DC-to-AC inverter.

True, but nothing you couldn't have tested initially with just a
voltmeter?

I did: something like 180 V RMS into a high-resistance load which dropped
to about 30 V with even a nominal load - I managed to find a 25 W cooker
bulb and lashed up a connection to it and even that caused the voltage
to drop immediately. I *think* (though it was a while ago and I may have
forgotten) the voltage returned to 180 when the load was removed
(leaving just the voltmeter) so it wasn't just that the battery was
flattened. That's why I wonder whether the inverter was shagged-out.

But I should have persisted with it... Ah well.


I remember buying it from a back-street Army surplus shop somewhere
near Cemetery Junction in Reading soon after I got my first job.

Not something I would expect to see in such a place.

They had all manner of surplus electronic kit from various places: TVs,
tape recorders, radios, record players. I even saw a broadcast-standard
open-reel video recorder of some strange format. Great big appliances
with big knobs and valves or else circuit boards of discrete transistors
- not an IC in sight! I think the manual for my scope was dated 1968 so
the technology dated from then. I bet nowadays you can get a little
oscilloscope adaptor with USB output for recording and display on a PC.
The shop was a real Aladdin's cave of stuff - shelves full of things
that most people probably wouldn't even have been able to identify. It
was a shop within a terrace of houses - a real back-street "you'd never
know it was there" place. That was in the mid-80s; I doubt whether it's
still there now.

Stewart of Reading? If so, yes they are still around but have moved out of
town.

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England
"I'd rather die of exhaustion than die of boredom" Thomas Carlyle