Back in 1959 a small garage was rented and a DIY television studio was born. The TV station was called PJ-TV because they were located in Port Jervis. They were broadcasting to its viewers instead of using the airwaves. Seems that things have come full circle, all of the big networks are turning to IP TV for a large portion of their offering and other initiatives such as TWIT and Revision 3 are solely internet based and entering the viewers homes on wires.

The 19 by 20 garage reminds me of the TWIT cottage a bit, they have recently expanded their staff and have taken over more rooms in the cottage so it’s now larger than the 380 sq foot PJ-TV garage though. For a look at the tour of the TWIT cottage that Mostly Lisa (Lisa Bettany) recorded have a look at the bottom of this article.

One day Hacked Gadgets will need to do a road trip and visit Leo Laporte at TWIT and Kevin Rose at Revision 3!

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I had great fun working on a cool Multimeter Clock project which got picked up by Design News for their Gadget Freak series. I thought it would be cool to have a clock that looks like an old Simpson 260 multimeter. The clock consists of three multimeters, the first meter displays hours, the second displays minutes and the last displays seconds. A 16F628A PIC microcontroller keeps track of time and outputs a calculated current to each meter to display the current time. The process to get it published took a bit of time and one of the most interesting aspects was going for the project photo shoot, the picture above is one of the outtakes.

I will be publishing tons of build details on my project site shortly, sign up for the mailing list to be alerted when the full project is up.

UPDATE: The full project page is now complete. The kit is also now available.

Our friend Daniel Eindhoven from the Netherlands has got his hands on an interesting piece of ancient medical equipment. He will be refurbishing this Voodoo Magic High Frequency Healing Device from the 1930s. I wonder if Dr. Eindhoven does house calls. It is truly quite shocking what people used to do to cure you. I guess some of its applications are not far fetched even these days though.

“This device works with some kind of electrodes consisting of glass tubes filled with different types of gas. There was also a copy of a leaflet with all the different electrodes that they sold in this particular shop. Prices in guilders. Most electrodes should go at very odd places, some at your eyes, others in holes and crevices which I can not mention here, partly because I won’t be able to access my own site anymore (due to the filter). I made sure to clean and disinfect the electrodes thoroughly, and I’m (obviously) not going to use them in the manner they were intended.”

Our friend Gio from DIY Audio Projects has sent in a cool Push-Pull Tube Amp Build. This tube amp fits into a 8 X 12 inch chassis and looks fantastic! Now if only we could find a drugstore with a tube tester. With cool equipment like this and tube TV troubleshooting guides popping up there is sure to be demand for tube testers once again?

"The basic design has been around for a long time (50 years or so). The problem with early applications was that it was difficult to force it to operate in a linear manner. It can only function in a class-A mode with both tubes always conducting. The reason this circuit is attractive is that it eliminates the need for a phase splitter stage. It requires only a single-ended driver. The advent of solid state electronics provided a solution to the problem. A simple application of a common LM317 IC voltage regulator converts it to a very accurate constant current source (CCS). Using a CCS in the cathode circuit of the SIPP stage forces it to operate in class-A. What was a sort of a mediocre output stage thus becomes highly accurate and quite excellent."

You might remember Michael Saunby, he was the guy that had the interesting clock that we were trying to determine heritage for. The clock was almost featured on Antiques Roadshow but unfortunately was left on the cutting room floor. Michael works with lots of antique electronics and this 1930 vintage amplifier and speaker is a great example of what can be done with a mix of old and new.

"The original amplifier was typical for a 1930s broadcast receiver, a single ended pentode with tone correction. The valve chosen was a high slope pentode type AC/SP3; as used by the BBC in pre-amplifiers from late 1930s through to the 1950s."

Back in 1959 this is what you would have been reading if your were an electronics professional. How things have changed from then to now, almost everything you purchase today is made to be disposable since you can produce a new board for less than it would take to troubleshoot and repair it. It is impressive how reliability has changed though since in this article they expect most people to spend at least 40 dollars per year on service calls to repair the TV, at only 5 dollars per service call this means that your TV is expected to break down every month and a half!

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