It's all good junk here.
Wednesday, April 29, 2026 at 06:02:42
If you want to mail order a Dayton Hamvention ticket, now is the time! You have until May 1st, after which tickets will be held will-call at the gate. This is for domestic orders, international orders are being held will-call right now.
See you there!
Order your ticket here: https://hamvention.org/purchase-tickets/
Tuesday, April 28, 2026 at 04:46:38
Recently, I decided to dip my hooves back into the cesspool that is YouTube. I’ve tried this before and failed, so I wasn’t terribly expectant of results. I’ve have some friends jonesing over it and wanting to see how I worked on things. There’s money in them thar vid-joes! I guess, so why not try it again?
Dealing with any of the big engines is a deal with the devil where you’re eventually going to lose. They hold all the cards, and even if your hand is good, theirs is always better because they can simply draw new cards until they have a better hand. They are the dealer, the player, and the paymaster. I already knew this, and this time was no different. I’m presenting this not as a whine, but as “don’t do the same thing over and over and expect different results.”
To start, making money on YT isn’t the easiest thing in the world. You’re bound by restrictions - content and imagery are big parts of that, but the biggest part is the subscriber base. You don’t start getting payouts until you reach at least 1000 subscribers with so many watch hours on your videos. You do this by allowing advertisers to buy time within your video, so right in the middle of an important part of the work, you get an ad for Fountain Spew, the latest dohickey that would make Ron Popeil go “ewwwww,” or Senator Bedfellow’s re-election campaign. If you’re unlucky, you get ads for things like Yaoi. Ask me how I know…And you see these ads over and over and over. You have some control over how many, but certain ads are forced on videos, including the obnoxious pre-roll ad. But…there’s no guarantees that there will be an advertiser wanting to put an ad on your type of video. Even if you’ve monetized your video and put an ad every 5 minutes (yes, I’ve seen videos like that) there are absolutely no givens that an ad will play. If your viewer has adblock installed, it doesn’t matter - no ad is played and YT knows this, so no money is made. YT knows this from the start because the pre-roll doesn’t play…why they haven’t simply implemented a “Adblock detected, you can’t watch this” system is beyond me. I guess they know that if they do this, it’s going to destroy a good portion of their userbase, but is that userbase doing anything other than watching? That’s a real dilemma and I’m not here to discuss the semantics of it.
Regardless, I established that there was probably no way I was going to make money on this kind of venture without really providing some sort of content that was polished and easily consumable, and I simply don’t have the hardware or time to capture and edit down video. What computing hardware I do posess is dedicated to particular purposes rather than general processing, and that isn’t going to change. There are channels out there doing that kind of work, two of them that I enjoy (Shang066 and radiotvphononut) are very organic and shakeycam in their presentations - but they also have been around long enough to have enjoyed the older YT that was less restrictive.
All of these things that follow I understand because everything online has been weaponized, but it makes it difficult for those of us that just want to use your services. Doesn’t make it any less painful, however.
The first difficulty I had was actually trying to make an account. Used to be that you just created a gmail account, attached a YouTube account to it, and you were done. I can’t remember if those were separate systems, but now they are, even though they fall under the same general account login. This is probably something we can thank Big G’s hysterical need for social media and the entire “+” mess that they tried for. You can still easily make a gmail account, but now you need to attach other things to it, including a phone number otherwise you can’t verify that you exist, attach another email to it, and then it unceasingly insists that you give it your home address. Now that you have a gmail account, you can go to YouTube and create a channel. You have to create a channel to do anything now on YT, including just comment on a video. Channel has been created, now the fun starts.
Immediately, you’re restricted to 15 minutes or less uploads, and you can’t stream. Ok…what I do is probably more useful as a long-form video or a livestream. Livestreaming makes a little sense, you don’t have any subscribers so there’s no reason to stream, but you need at least 50 to open that up. The other restriction, you need to provide some proof that you’re real. Apparently a phone number that they already have (and was once attached to an Android account) doesn’t count towards this.
Here’s where I ran into problems on my first attempt a few years ago. At the time, the only real way to prove your identity was to photograph your ID and let them fondle it. I reluctantly did so, and was never able to get them to verify the ID and release account restrictions. After about 6 months of posting little videos and not getting anywhere with having restrictions released, I gave up. The stuff I posted gained no subscribers in that time, even though I promoted where I could, and even watch time was very small. I assumed that being uninteresting was probably 95% of the problem, with the other 5% being the logistics of actually getting YT to provide your content to people. I couldn’t gain any traction to even get feedback, and even friends didn’t subscribe because most of them just bookmark the people they want to watch because they don’t like the system.
I deleted this channel and just said “Ok, thank you. I’m sorry, it didn’t work - it’s me, not you.”
This time, I was able to actually verify that I exist and I’m an adult because they allow you to do a short selfie video. I did so, and the next day restrictions on length were lifted. Age restrictions seemed to be lifted as well, I guess there aren’t many 17 year-olds out there with white hair and a beard. Great! Still can’t stream, but let’s build some subscribers.
I posted a couple of videos - one about testing some parts with a new piece of test equipment I have, and another long-form video about working on a device. Nothing fancy, just trying out the platform. It’s not polished, and I sound like a dead pig at the bottom of the ocean, but it is what it is with the hardware I have. Better stuff can come later. Yeah, they go up, no issues, but of course the people that asked me about making videos don’t have accounts so no one subscribes. Well, my bestest friend in the whole world does, but he’s that kind of guy. So I have one. Great, let’s do some more. You’re not going to get an audience without doing something, and I wanted to do something. I figured out what hardware I had would work for this, and a way to easily trim these long-form videos down to a manageable length. Let’s roll!
My ability to use that channel suddenly starts to degrade. I can log in, but actually getting to the dashboard becomes erratic. I start getting lots of error messages until there was nothing but error messages. This seems to be a common thing with YT studio, but no one else I knew that made content was having this issue, even the complainers on that alien site didn’t have anything to say about it. I tried for a few days to make it work but things just … weren’t anymore. I couldn’t edit, view, see, or manage anything. There’s no one to offer help, so I just deleted that and started over with a new channel with a similar name.
I was able to upload some stuff to this and it seemed to work. However, I had a streaming audio source playing in the background. I like to listen to something while working, and I usually have Music Lake or Space Travel Radio playing. Both of these channels are low-key, low-beat, calm music that goes well with trying to concentrate on something in front of you. I had Music Lake playing, and of course the mic picked up small bits of it.
One of the things you need to remember about anything online is it’s all a weapon. Music, or your use thereof, is a very evil and dirty thing when it comes to video. The music industry got a shock when MP3s came about and suddenly it became easy to share songs. It got another shock when artists found out they could simply bypass the record companies and publish their own music on platforms like YT and other places. To that, the entire industry is now so scared that you might play 30 seconds of a music clip inadvertently in a video and collect 0.00000000000385 cents doing so, that they will blast your channel into oblivion instead of looking at that content and going “Oh, yeah, it’s just a radio playing in the background.” They’ve always been anal about music played in public spaces, but now it’s really real - you can lose an entire body of work because you accidentally played a minute of some crap pap pop poo in your video.
Back to my situation. YT detected 3 instances of something in the background. While it claims to have identified them, it stated that the creator had generally issued a license for this to be used on YT, but this would, to wit, prevent monetization of a video if such a thing were to happen in the future. So, if I want to do this, I can’t even listen to anything. I have to sit there in silence, working on a device. This isn’t going to work for me.
Then we move on to the actual content of the videos. You’re not going to sit there and watch me solder parts and run wire for two hours. It’s not going to happen, and you don’t need to be nice about it, I understand. I wouldn’t watch this and I’m the one doing it. There’s just nothing interesting about the in-between parts, the good bits are the before and after pictures and a discussion of what happened, not watching someone take 30 minutes to figure out why the previous owner of a device did what they did, like they did it, and try to reverse it. You can’t see it up close because it’s deep inside a chassis, and that’s all there is to it. Let’s not even get into the logistics of the things I work with. Pull out the soldering gun to do a big chassis joint? That looks like a firearm and YT isn’t going to like that! The site is so scared of that sort of thing that they will happily de-monetize you if your car’s handbrake happens to look like a firearm in a video - and you’re stuck in support purgatory fighting with LLM responses to your argument.
I take that video down and put up some placeholder posts until I can figure things out.
Yesterday, I get an email from Big G. (no, I’m not saying their name.) “We can’t verify you’re an adult. Please submit more information.” My account is now limited to safe search, and other restrictions for underage individuals has been turned on. I can’t undo this, it’s a permanent thing unless I provide more information to them. This is where the services disconnect comes from. Mail and YT are operated as separate entities under a common umbrella, even though YT really does provide the back-end login services as I understand it. So the video I provided to YT doesn’t count for anything else.
Another selfie video, or preferably a credit card or your ID. They really want your ID, they just won’t say it. Remember the time when this company said don’t use your real name online? Well, too bad, now you need to provide a sample before we’ll allow you to use our service. At this point, the pain in actually getting the account setup, the crap with music clips in the background, the suddenly error’d account, and the desperate wheedling from G about my age is just more than I want to deal with. I can’t even keep the account open without restrictions, so I close it. wereboar-projects is deleted, and I’m not going to recover it. There are only so many hoops this trained boar will jump through before I get tired and go home.
There are other video platforms, but can you name them? One of them, a site called Rumble, is someplace you may have heard of. Maybe. It’s kind of a odd place. Not what I’d call conspiracy laden, but it certainly attracts a different crowd and it’s known as the site where you go if you can’t use YT. That’s neither bad nor good, and there is plenty of other content there, but they do the same curation and content striking as YT. My videos would be flagged in the same manner. There’s another one, called Brighteon. Bet you didn’t know that one existed, did you? This is where the stranger things go. Again, not bad…just not really someplace that’s going to attract attention, and not where I need to be. They are very hands off on moderation, saying they rely on you to make sure you are providing the proper licensed content. That just tells me that you’re going to get served directly instead of getting content strikes, and I’m not willing to deal with that at all. Again, neither good nor bad, it just has it’s own audience. It’s just not my place. There are even more that go farther down the rabbit hole. I’ve seen those like I’ve seen a rare coin. Maybe once or twice in my life.
But in reality, what I’m trying to accomplish isn’t really compatible with video. As I stated, you’re not going to watch someone sitting at a bench just…working. That’s boring. It’s why I don’t talk about the process much, you all know how to put wires in a hole and solder them. I can’t get down in to show what’s going on because that just doesn’t work either. While I haven’t abandoned the idea completely, anything I do in the future will just be short stuff for fun, not an attempt to actually do anything like create a channel.
So…stay tuned, more good junk and projects on the way. Dayton is coming up, Breezeshooters soon after, who knows what we’ll see!
Thank you for your time, and I sincerely appreciate you coming to hang out here on projects.
Tuesday, April 21, 2026 at 08:57:30
I’ve added some new documents to the library, and I’m going to try and create a new zip every quarter.
This archive contains all of the documents I’ve collected for projects - at least ones that I can share. This is currently about 430MB, and is an archive of zipped files of many different kinds. Grab a copy here:
Dropbox: https://www.dropbox. … ujy&st=e7nvbey6&dl=0
The January archive is also available, but previous editions have been removed to save space.
The Google Drive link has been removed because Google decided to be rather unhappy with my video attempts. Sorry!
You can also download individual documents of interest directly from the archive: https://wereboar.com … r=wereboar-documents
Most of these are zipped PDFs, although a few are folders of information about the device in question.
image courtesy of freepik
Tuesday, April 14, 2026 at 08:37:14
Germanium diodes are a staple of electronics. It appears as the detector in both radio and television, the tone chain of musical instrument amp, and plenty of other places. This part offers a low voltage drop, low capacitance, and relatively high speed. They used to be cheap and everywhere, and still have plenty of uses - especially for experimenters.
Unfortunately, germanium diodes aren’t common these days, and aren’t made in any great quantities. There’s also the online hysteria surrounding the part, where unscrupulous sellers are more than happy to label a schottky diode as germanium. While these are fine for detectors in radio, they aren’t germanium and if you’re expecting the properties of germanium, you won’t get it.
However…
The USSR made germanium parts right up until the end. There’s still millions of germanium diodes out there from this era, and, while even those are starting to get harder to get, you can still get them relatively easy from online sellers and auction sites. These diodes are perfectly good germanium parts, and came in many different styles and ratings. For most experimental purposes, there’s no difference between parts, and this isn’t going to discuss that. There is, however, a singular difference between Western and Soviet parts.
Here’s an old GE 1N60 diode. This image came from…the Internet. Somewhere, I’m sorry I don’t remember where.
Note that the package states the cathode, i.e. negative-most terminal, is denoted by the band, or the bar on the graphic symbol (the diode symbol) printed on the glass. In this case, the cathode is pointed towards the left. This is the way Western diodes are marked, and is the way pretty much every diode made today is marked. There are some exceptions, but there’s almost always some identifier to indicate what’s what.
Here’s a bunch of diodes.
I’m going to test these parts. We have, from top to bottom:
A traditional 1N34A glass diode.
An unknown germanium - this may be a 1N60.
A Soviet type D9A.
All of them have well denoted bands. I’m going to toss in a 1N4007 Si rectifier diode (not shown) as well, just for comparison.
Here’s the parts as viewed through a magnifying glass. Of particular note is the Soviet part - you can clearly see the flying lead and the point of contact on the germanium crystal.
1N34A
Unknown germanium
Soviet D9A
What’s the purpose here? Well…the Soviet part has something interesting about it. If you’re familiar with how the diode works, you’ve already noted the issue.
Let’s test the parts, I’m going to be using my old reliable, a meter I purchased many many years ago. It has a diode function that tells you the voltage drop across the diode’s junction.
For diodes, these are the “perfect” theoretical voltage drops across a junction:
Silicon: 0.7VDC
Germanium: 0.3VDC
In reality, it’s closer to 0.5VDC and 0.23VDC, respectively. Let’s test the parts on the bench. First one is the silicon diode, for comparison.
Note the negative lead of the meter is on the banded side of the diode, so we know that’s the cathode. We see the expected 0.5xxVDC drop of the junction.
Here’s the 1N34A:
That’s in line with the expected drop.
Here’s the unknown germanium:
Again, the expected drop.
Here’s the Soviet D9A:
It’s correct, that’s zero. There’s no drop across this device, indicating the unit isn’t conducting. It’s connected correctly, isn’t it?
No - Soviet diodes put their bands on the anode. That is, they are marked completely backwards from what we accept as diode marking. Here’s the device properly biased:
There’s the expected drop. Completely backwards from what we expected.
Soviet germanium diodes are the most common Ge diode available at this time, so they show up in a lot of places. Radio kits, fuzz boxes for guitars, small signal rectification circuits - anywhere a diode with it’s properties are needed. For a radio kit, it’s not really terribly important which side of the information you recover from the carrier, but if you’re trying to rectify a signal it’s very important. You need to make sure you install them correctly, and if you follow “accepted” conventions you’re not going to accomplish that goal.
Measure your part - that’s the best way to verify what you have.
Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 06:35:27
Recently, a forum buddy and I talked about capacitor measurement and devices to do such work. I decided, since I have a number of devices and access to a calibrated measurement device, to check a number of parts to see how well each device matches.
Simply put, there are many out there on the market under $100, and I have a number of them. I wanted to both know how these performed, and I told the forum I’d see which one performed the best. Thus, the testing.
The reference device is an Agilent E4980A. This is a thousands-of-dollars instrument that tells you nearly everything you could need to know about capacitors. It’s calibrated, and has compensated kelvin clips for the measurement end. There are no pictures of this device in situ because, while the facility it’s in says I’m free to use it, they asked that no pictures be taken inside the facility. Sure thing, no prob. You can find pictures of this device online.
For this testing, I wasn’t worried about marked value vs. actual value, although that was recorded for posterity. All of the parts save one is NOS or RFE. These parts were chosen to be representative of the components you would find inside of an older device, especially the kind that typically graces my bench.
Capacitance meters were chosen based on the fact that you can get them, or their re-badged cousins easily at a show or online. Those devices are:
A generic L/C meter from an online shop. No name.
A FNIRSI LC1020E.
A B&K Precision Model 830 Autoranging Capacitance Meter.
A NIU M-Tester from Dayton 2016.
The leads in the picture were used for all devices except the m-tester, which needed the jig clips shown. These were made by me the night before testing using stock from my parts bins.
Components were either things I had in storage, things I had bought for projects, or components removed from devices. All save the new one on the top left were suspect, leakage/etc. did not factor in to my testing.
They are, from left to right, top to bottom:
A Supertech wet, 100μF, new.
A GI 50μF dry, NOS.
A Mallory dry, 20μF, RFE
A Good*All wax paper 0.25μF, RFE.
A Bumblebee dry paper, 0.047μF, RFE.
A Solar postage stamp, 100pF, RFE.
A Sangamo Silver Mica dogbone, 1nF, new.
A Aerovox postage stamp, 6300pF, NOS.
A CornellDublier postage stamp, 10000pF, RFE.
A Bumblebee paper in oil, 0.022μF, blue wire lead, RFE. (Leaks oil.)
A Bumblebee paper in oil, 0.022uF, bare wire lead, RFE. (no leaks yet!)
A Sprague wet, 15μF, RFE.
A GI encapsulated paper, 0.033μF, RFE.
New = new part purchased within the last few years.
NOS = an old part, otherwise unused.
RFE = Removed From Equipment.
wet = wet electrolytic
dry = dry electrolytic
The rest should be self explanatory.
The postage stamps are presumed to be mica, but it’s hard to tell. Paper was packaged that way, so no assumptions are being made to their construction.
Testing was simply connecting the unknown, adjusting the frequency (if possible,) and recording the value. Test frequencies used were:
120Hz - All electrolytics
1KHz - All others
The reason for this is these meters use a component of measurement called reactance. This is basically resistance of the part, with a phase angle. Geometry students will know that as a phasor, a complex number with an imaginary √-1 component. This complex number is a resistance value and an angle, -90° for a perfect capacitor.
You can’t measure DC resistance of a capacitor because it holds a static charge on it’s plates, and presents an open to your meter. AC, however, “goes through a capacitor like piss through a tin horn,” according to my first electronics instructor, Mr. Norman. This complex number is why you have a capacitor on motors. Not only does the capacitor help provide a kick to start the motor (the storage capacity of the device,) but the capacitance tries to drag the opposite force of the motor’s inductance back to zero where you only pay for the actual power used, not the power represented by the complex number. It’s basically black magic with some science added for flavor.
Regardless, data was recorded from all devices and compared to the reference unit. I originally thought that the venerable B&K 830 would provide the best measurement, as it was a fairly expensive instrument sold to industry, but that was not the case. I’m assuming this is because it doesn’t change the measurement frequency, but tries to use a best approximation for everything.
The FNIRSI device, however, came within 0.5% of the Agilent reference except on a very small value part, of which is probably due to capacitance of the leads…1 part in 100 is 1%, so any small deviation is going to show up. It’s far better than you’d need as a hobbyist and shows how far we’ve come in tech. The M-Tester and the B&K 830 kind of went around themselves competing for 2nd place, but the M-Tester offers other component tests and is really good enough for most stuff. It’s a fairly valuable device on my bench.
I realized after the fact that the FNIRSI device came with kelvin clips - I’ll re-run the test at a later date and publish new data.
The blue generic device came in third. It’s not terribly accurate, but it did the job. If you needed something and were working on old equipment, this device would satisfy your needs.
The FNIRSI LC1020E, at about $80, is a superb value and will get you industrial bench performance at a hobby price. This is without using the compensated clips, so you get an instrument with leads you can reliably expect to provide good data, assuming you can set it up. The device does far more than this, and offers a staggering amount of data on the parts.
The M-Tester is a good, quick way to check all common parts, including common semiconductors. While not as accurate, they’re cheap, good enough, and should be in your travel bag if you do electronics of any sort.
The B&K 830 is meh. These still show up on the secondary market, but really don’t do anything that modern devices can’t. They are fairly rugged and can be powered from the line, so if you need a good-enough device with those parameters this is your man.
The generic one is nah. If you can get one for a couple bucks at a show, sure. It’s good to have a 4th opinion. Otherwise? Pass.
Friday, March 20, 2026 at 06:45:20
If you hit Projects recently, you may have noticed the site running slow or not responding.
I can’t be certain, but I think that had something to do with the comments. I decided to re-open them for a while with “hold for approval” selected and some basic keyword filtering to reduce the adult spam. That immediately gained me a list of spam in Cyrillic that, when translated, was more-or-less meaningless, as well as the expected adult website spam. But site performance also started to suffer with random timeouts, poor image retrieval, and just overall slow times. The host’s site tools would similarly time out.
Commenting on boards such as mine is highly weaponized. I expected nothing - and got it. Comments closed, some code was modified to remove the ability to get into the comment form or feed, and that was that.
But, site performance came back pretty much within an hour or two of doing that.
After the two brain cells I have left managed to connect “Site performance better” + “Right after comments closed” = 4, I pulled the logs for the last few weeks. I found what I was looking for:
14.184.185.155 - - [18/Mar/2026:06:02:01 -0400] "GET /projects/index.php/2026/01/15/the-sabtronics-2010a-dvm-part-1-checkout-and-observations/comments/ HTTP/1.1" 200 5646 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Safari/537.36"
216.73.216.52 - - [18/Mar/2026:06:02:26 -0400] "GET /projects/index.php/2025/04/22/two-hamfests-this-weekend-april-26-and-27/comments/feed/rss2 HTTP/1.1" 200 398 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)"
85.208.96.201 - - [18/Mar/2026:06:31:10 -0400] "GET /razorback/index.php/2024/08/04/the-dial-lamp-can-be-more-important-than-you-think/comments/ HTTP/1.1" 404 438 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)"
Just page after page after page of bots like Claude, SEMrush, Petalbot, and countries like Egypt, Viet Nam, China, and Germany slamming the site trying to retrieve the comments feeds on both the production and (now turned off) dev site I was using to test new themes. Once I turned that feed off and removed the dev site, a few more 404s and then the storm was gone.
You’ll notice some familiar names in there. Claude, is of course, Anthropic’s AI bot, and it was a very bad actor. I’m considering blocking this one via IP and name just because they are hard on things. SEMRush is SEO, so someone is indexing my site with that. I saw Huawei’s bot, Meta’s bot, ByteDance’s bot, and others, all slamming to get those comments. Same posts, over and over and over. I haven’t even located the comment posters yet, there’s so much noise.
The minute they (comments) were gone, it stopped and performance was back. Would that have eventually slowed as these bots finally filled their need for new URL indexing, or would they have assumed that a comments feed might get comments so it needs to be checked over and over? I have no idea, but regardless of that, comments were not useful on this page and they are gone. Because of the way this blogging platform works, you’ll see “🐗❤️” instead, which just takes you to the post from the main feed, or the top of the post when viewing a single post.
As always, if you’d like to comment on something, please use either Mastodon or the Telegram feeds: Channel Feed and Chat Channel - anyone can join the feed, it generally follows here but I do post one-off shots of things I’m working with or find interesting. The chat feed is by approval, but I generally won’t disapprove unless the person is spamming.
See you at the hamfest!
Friday, March 6, 2026 at 07:15:33
If you want to follow what’s going on here, there’s now a telegram channel. It will generally follow the blog, with perhaps a few more messages about events here and there, as well as pictures of things I see while out and about that could be of interest to the channel but don’t warrant a full post.
Check it out: https://t.me/wereboarprojects. You will, of course, need Telegram but you can preview the feed without joining.
There’s also a chat channel: https://t.me/wereboar_projects_chat - it’s open to all but new members must be approved. This is just to prevent spambots.
Friday, February 27, 2026 at 07:13:25
Early boar ticket prices end March 1st, after that the price goes from $26 to $30. This ticket gets you in for all three days - May 15th, 16th and 17th. Ordering now also gives the post office plenty of time to deliver to you.
Early sales have ended. The price of tickets is now $30.
Thursday, February 26, 2026 at 08:11:47
If you’d like to comment on a post, please do so - click the link at the bottom of each post that has the word comment in it.
You’ll need a name, and will have to answer a simple question to submit your comment. After that, I’ve set it up so that they are hidden until I can review them - while this won’t stop the spammers, you won’t see it until I make sure it’s not spam. I’ll try and look at any posted comments a couple times a week.
Let me know what you think about the work I’m doing, if you like it (or don’t like it, I’ll take constructive criticism,) or even if you’d like to see more of something I’ve posted. Keep it clean, things that are obviously spam, bait, and profanity won’t be visible.
They’re closed again. Strange Russian spam that I couldn’t figure out what they were posting for, and posts that mention sites that only talk about fans…there’s nothing of use here. Please use mastodon to comment, or join the telegram channels.
There was also the oddity of poor performance shortly after I re-opened the comments, all of which vanished the moment I closed them and removed the links from pages. I have to wonder if someone was slamming the site trying to post comments only to be rejected due to the simple keyword filtering I installed. I’ll know more when I do forensics on the logs.
Check out the Telegram channel instead. https://t.me/wereboarprojects and it’s accompanying chat channel https://t.me/wereboar_projects_chat - You can also use my Mastodon feed to comment.
Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 12:30:54
One of the things that has been suggested to me is a quick way to find all of the major projects that have appeared on this blog. The easiest way for me to do this would be as you see it here: a single post, similar to hamfest pictures, that collects all of the major device projects that have appeared here.
This hub contains all the the things I am currently working on, or have completed. New projects that are still underway generally appear at the bottom of the post, and the post will grow as more are added. The only things that are not here is a few small things that I did for other people, or the home automation stuff. You can find the latter in a new category on the sidebar aptly labeled “Automation”.
There’s a permanent link on the sidebar that will bring you directly to this hub post.
Click on the title of each item to be taken to that project’s hub.
EICO 145 Signal Tracer rebuild
Heathkit IG-72 Signal Generator repair
PACO G-30 RF Signal Generator rework
Olson TE-189 C-R Analyzer rework
Hallicrafters S-38C #1 capacitor replacement
Heathkit AF-1 Analog Frequency Meter rebuild
Heathkit AG-7 Audio Signal Generator rebuild
Zenith X184 Clock Radio (AA5) repair
Leader LBO-310A Oscilloscope repair
Hallicrafters S-38C #2 capacitor replacement
A Homebrew TRF Radio Set analysis
Viz WP-705 Power Supply repair
Workman N71-067 Power Supply repair
Simpson 715 AC Voltmeter rebuild
Superior Instruments Company Model 76 C-R Bridge rebuild
EICO 950A R-C Bridge
This one has just started, the latest part is here: https://wereboar.com … -did-they-do-to-you/
EICO 249 VTVM
This one has just started, the latest part is here: https://wereboar.com … part-1-observations/
Precision Model ST-22 Signal Tracer
This one has just started, the latest part is here: https://wereboar.com … part-1-observations/
EICO 242 FET VOM
I was going to let this one go, but reopened the project. The original post is here, new posts on the way: https://wereboar.com … an-eico-242-fet-vom/
