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Radioshack 22-820 Pocket Multimeter

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Radioshack 22-820As a quick review, I picked up a Radio Shack 22-820 based on a review of it (and other pocket meters) here, knowing it was no longer in production. I already have a couple of other meters (including a Fluke 189 that I bought days before this one). But I really wanted a meter for either my bag, or my car. So I found one at a Radio Shack and picked it up. All and all, it’s a great little meter. It’s small, rugged, and tests just about everything needed in a meter. Voltage, Resistance (with continuity), and amperage up to 200mA (which is a bit low if you wanted to use it for this, but heck, it’s only got so much space. Hard to have true current handling at this size… plus, try putting a 10A fuse in this space).

For $30, it’s a great little secondary meter, or a primary if all you ever do is check resistance/continuity and/or voltage. My only suggestion would be to pick up some basic aligator clip attachments (easier to test continuity on circuits that way).

[xrr rating=5/5]

Junghans Stopwatch

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JunghansSeveral months ago, I read a review by Ken Rockwell on the Junghans 1/10th second mechanical stopwatch here, and ever since then I’ve been intrigued. Ebay has a pretty consistent supply of them that go for anywhere from $25-150 (sometimes over $300). A couple months ago I lost an auction for one that was non-functional, but the last week, I won one for a mere $50 that the only thing wrong was the lens (plastic crystal) had come out. Well that’s easy enough.

After receiving it, it appeared to be in pretty good shape, though the lens couldn’t be self re-inserted. Luckily for me, and the reason I tried bidding on a broken one, and this one, is my wife works for a jewelry store that has a full time horologist on staff. So, she took it to work, and he was able to remove the back, then the movement, and reinsert the lens (needs to be put in that way, but also needs the flexibility, which is why it’s plastic), and said everything looked good (didn’t service it, since it seemed good) ((Did note the wells appeared a little dry, but nothing bad considering the age of the watch)). As a bonus, he put it into his fancy watch accuracy tester (not sure the technical name for this), and found it was only 8 seconds fast per day! That’s nearly Rolex accuracy (-4/+6 seconds per day) which is awesome for a 40-50 year old watch!

All and all, I’m extremely happy with the purchase. For those looking, the watch has 7 jewels (some sites indicate it’s 17, which is incorrect, that’s the 1/100th second watch). And if you’re really geeky, here is a mp3 of the watch ticking ((which according to the Foley artist at work, who did the recording, this ticking sound is relatively rare)). For additional info, check out Ken Rockwell’s review linked above. =)

[xrr rating=5/5]

Startech Gigabit USB3 adapter

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startech-usb3-gigabitI got a Macbook Air 11″ a few months back, and honestly, I love the thing. But one item does bug me… the lack of a network jack (wires are just faster than wireless still). Obviously I know why Apple didn’t include one: it would be thicker than the machine already is. Now, Apple makes a Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter, and a USB2 to 100mbit adapter, but the former is no use when you’re using an external display, and the latter is slow. So when I looked for a good option, the Startech USB3 Gigabit Adapter came up, and looked promising. USB3 has a theoretical limit of 5Gbits/sec (more than enough), and they have Mac drivers (obviously it would be nice if Apple had native drivers, but I’ll take what I can get).

Work ordered a few, and once I got my hands on it, I thought I’d put it through it’s paces comparing it to the Thunderbolt adapter, the Apple USB2 adapter, wireless (802.11N 5ghz), and just to test USB3 throughput, a 128GB SSD in a Other World Computing Envoy (SSD came from a 2011 Macbook Air).

Network tests were performed with iperf, with the server side running on my Mac Mini Server, with the TCP window size set to 129kbyte, and an Airport Extreme (Dual Band, MB763LL/A, Mar. 2009, Firmware 7.61) as both the wireless access point, and switch). Tests were performed five times, with the top and the bottom result thrown out, and the middle three averaged. The SSD test was done with dd ((specifically dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/SSD/test bs=8192 count=500000)).

Device Avgerage Mbit/s
Startech Gigabit USB3 881.3
Apple 100mbit USB2 94.13
Apple Gigabit Thunderbolt 932.7
802.11N 5ghz Wireless 149.7
OWC 128GB Envoy SSD 1452.2

So, what does that really tell us? One, the thunderbolt gigabit adapter is the fastest option (which makes sense since thunderbolt is basically a PCIe interface, and very little overhead. And two, the USB3 gigabit interface is pretty quick. It’s a bit slower (about 5%) than the Thunderbolt option, but still WAY faster than Apple’s 100mbit option (~9x), and wireless (~6x) for that matter. The SSD test proved that it’s not a USB3 limitation that’s capping the gigabit adapter at less than gigabit speeds (could be the Startech drivers, or the AX88179 chipset itself). All and all, I’m not complaining. The package is small, lightweight, and it has link lights (something Apple has never been fond of, despite their extreme usefulness).

If you’ve got a Macbook Air, or a Macbook Retina, or hell, a PC laptop without a Gigabit ethernet port, but with USB3, get one. They’re only ~$35 on Amazon.

[xrr rating=5/5]