So what's the truth about lead-free solder ?

[Arfa Daily]

It's not a troll.

New data ought be available as to the effects on actual in-service
reliability of
lead-free by now. It seems as I expected, anecdotally, that musical
equipment
products that tend to see high levels of vibration are suffering.

Graham

As are most other products that are *not* subject to excessive amounts of
vibration.

Arfa

 

[Spurious Response]

And that's if Global Warming doesn't get us first...

If you believe that to be a possibility, are you not concerned about the
additional carbon based fuels used to heat these lead free solders to the
higher temperatures that they require?

Good one.

 

[Spurious Response]

Except when it breaks up.

Graham

Nope. If you tune the signal, you get ALL of the data. You must exceed
more than ten percent bit error rate for a dropout to occur, and it is
bit error rate that matters most for a "tuned" channel.

 

[Arfa Daily]

Tin Whiskers:-

For those who though leaded solder was best.
Here is the problem with lead free solder.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/85/8529sci1.html

Colin

Yes, a good write-up of the problems, and why leaded solder didn't suffer
from them.

Arfa

 

[Eeyore]

Nope. If you tune the signal, you get ALL of the data. You must exceed
more than ten percent bit error rate for a dropout to occur, and it is
bit error rate that matters most for a "tuned" channel.

I have a cable TV set top box. There's no tuning involved. It still breaks up
occasionally.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

Joe Chisolm wrote

Dr Howard Johnson (High Speed Digital Design) had this article in
his email newsletter (and posted on his site). Interesting read.
Rollback RoHS: http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/news/10_01.htm

Well seems [all] we have to [do is] make some traces .65mm apart

Some ? ALL !

Goodbye microelectronics.

I just came across this too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest

" At 13.2 degrees Celsius (about 56 degrees Fahrenheit) and below, pure tin
transforms from the (silvery, ductile) allotrope of beta-modification white tin
to brittle, alpha-modification grey tin. Eventually it decomposes into powder,
hence the name tin pest."

That's what cost Napoleon dearly in Russia. He lost his armies to
exposure due to their uniforms literally falling off their bodies.

All Tin buttons, even on their boots.

http://ds.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/adw03/c-eight/france/moscow.htm

Oh, I recall it now.

It seems that the Open University has studied this issue and has indeed found tin
pest in 'cheap' lead-free solders that are 99%+ tin. These are in commercial use too
!

http://materials.open.ac.uk/srg/srg_tp.htm

The question next should be whether the popular SAC alloys are affected.

Graham

 

[Spurious Response]

I have a cable TV set top box. There's no tuning involved. It still breaks up
occasionally.

IT tunes itself, dipshit.

Do you actually think I meant that you had a knob to turn?

Get your head out of your twenty year behind the digitally tuned
receiver world ass.

OK... I'll spell it out for you.

If it ACQUIRES the signal, and locks it in, it gets ALL packets from
the HEAVILY FEC coded stream, and can handle up to a 10% bit error rate
before the "tuning" starts to lose, and not be able to repair with the
FEC, data packets. When that happens, one starts to lose audio and or
video or could see some video artifacts. It usually results in short
term. low frame count dropouts.

So it isn't "breaking up". That is an analog expression. In digital
broadcast streams, the term is "dropout".

 

[Spurious Response]

The question next should be whether the popular SAC alloys are affected.

Graham

I didn't read that cite I posted a link to well enough. It barely
mentions it.


http://ap.pennnet.com/Articles/Arti...Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=216209

 

[Eeyore]

IT tunes itself, dipshit.

Which part of " There's no tuning involved " didn't you understand ?

You press a button, it gives you the channel. Of course I know it does any internal
tuning required in firmware.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

So it isn't "breaking up".

Yes it 'breaks up'. Typically with weird pixellation.

That is an analog expression.

No it isn't.

In digital broadcast streams, the term is "dropout".

No, a dropout is a momentary LOSS of signal.

Graham

 

[Spurious Response]

Which part of " There's no tuning involved " didn't you understand ?

Except that you made the fucking stupid remark as if you were
attempting to "educate" me. Nice back pedal though.

You press a button, it gives you the channel. Of course I know it does any internal
tuning required in firmware.

You didn't grasp the post though, and made the remark unnecessarily.

 

[Spurious Response]

Yes it 'breaks up'. Typically with weird pixellation.


No it isn't.



No, a dropout is a momentary LOSS of signal.

No. In HDTV broadcast, "dropout" is when a tuned station has more than
about 10% bit error rate, and the FEC cannot repair the data stream, and
everything from a few picture artifacts appears, to complete frame losses
(dropouts) occur. The picture artifacts are also dropouts, just not
those that cause the tuning device to display a blank screen for that
given frame, which they do when it gets beyond a certain point.

If they wanted to, they could show you the frames, and you would see
horrendous amounts of image artifacts, and likely audio problems as well.

It IS called dropout. Lost packets ARE lost "signal" as the packet would
not have been lost, were it not for the tuner's inability to reconstruct
any missing packet data from the FEC coding. This has been true from way
back in the early satellite receiver days.

Videocipher

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocipher

Digicipher II (most closely related to the new HDTV broadcast schema).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCipher_2

The current HDTV broadcast schema is also a General Instrument format,
now owned by Motorola.

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:05:06 -0700) it happened Spurious Response

There are SEVERAL HDTV set top tuners out there that will pipe the
finished signal into a standard TV.

The boxes that are sold here are equipped with a SCART connector, a waste.
My 30 year old portable has no SCART, and neither is it HDTV (high resolution).
HDTV is here only available in HDMI DHCP, and still rare anyways.
The normal broadcasting on 'digitenne' here is not HDTV, but DVB-T 720x576.
The idea of a 'portable' is that you bring it to the camping, switch it on, and
see the picture. This fails now for many portables.
I am watching digital TV via the PC for satellite, and also via USB with
a settop box for terrestrial.
This allows me to record transport-stream, burn to DVD, automate things, etc.

I have not seen any digitenne portable TVs yet, but I am sure the market will
soon overflow with these.
I do see a lot of very cheap analog TVs for sale

What is nice about digital
broadcasts is that when you have the signal, you have it all. No snow,
No herringbone patterns. Crisp and clean, with no caffeine.

mmm, it is actually not so simple, for example with satellite
we now are moving from DVB-S to DVB-S2, and also from 720x576 to 1980x1080 interlaced
or progressive, all with HDCP / HDMI..... using MPEG4 / H264 with some sort
of audio, well we have now mp2, AC3, more to follow.....
That, and your sets fall apart after 3 years because of lead-free, it is a great time
for manufacturers of electronics consumers stuff now ain't it?
Not even to mention Blu-ray versus HD-DVD or whatever, no connector fits....
no format is the same....
It is a wild wild world out there

 

[Jan Panteltje]

Jan Panteltje wrote:



What ever happened to 'multiwire' (or some such trade name)? It was
a multilayered weld-bonded wiring alternative to multilayer PCBs
in the '60s and '70s and was very rugged, easily implemented with
NC technology, and used no solder of course.

Since each layer is built up in succession, between power and ground
planes, even BGAs can be accomodated.

Regards,

Michael

Never heard of it, sound OK though.

 

[Eeyore]

Except that you made the fucking stupid remark as if you were
attempting to "educate" me. Nice back pedal though.

Repeating myself (for emphasis) is backpedalling is it ? What a curious view you have of
the world.

You didn't grasp the post though, and made the remark unnecessarily.

Don't be absurd.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

No. In HDTV broadcast, "dropout" is when a tuned station has more than
about 10% bit error rate, and the FEC cannot repair the data stream, and
everything from a few picture artifacts appears, to complete frame losses
(dropouts) occur. The picture artifacts are also dropouts, just not
those that cause the tuning device to display a blank screen for that
given frame, which they do when it gets beyond a certain point.

If they wanted to, they could show you the frames, and you would see
horrendous amounts of image artifacts, and likely audio problems as well.

It IS called dropout. Lost packets ARE lost "signal" as the packet would
not have been lost, were it not for the tuner's inability to reconstruct
any missing packet data from the FEC coding. This has been true from way
back in the early satellite receiver days.

Videocipher

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocipher

Digicipher II (most closely related to the new HDTV broadcast schema).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCipher_2

The current HDTV broadcast schema is also a General Instrument format,
now owned by Motorola.

Thanks for playing. It is like taking candy from a baby though.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

Spurious Response wrote

Right, I turned in a portable TV last week.

The boxes that are sold here are equipped with a SCART connector, a waste.

I imagine you haven't looked very hard in that case. Many have UHF outputs.

Graham

 

[Jan Panteltje]

konijne keutel Eeyore wrote in

I imagine you haven't looked very hard in that case. Many have UHF outputs.

Graham

If you had as much as a clue, did not cut half the posting, knew at least
half as much about TV as about rabbits, you would be chaising them.

 

[Eeyore]

Eeyore wrote

If you had as much as a clue, did not cut half the posting

I wasn't replying to the bits I trimmed.

Graham

 

[Jan Panteltje]

I wasn't replying to the bits I trimmed.

Graham

To enlighten the others: to buy anything with any sort of analog output sucks,
as analog is dead at least here in the Netherlands (except for audio).
Buying a settop box with USB output, if you have a laptop with USB, creates the
portable TV with much better quality and recording possibility.
The USB settop box I bought runs from a 12 V adapter, so also from a car battery.
I researched quite a bit to get the best deal, and SCART was not part of that,
let alone a horrible interference prone, PAL coding artefacts decorated
UHF analog output.
ftp://panteltje.com/pub/dvb-t-nl.txt