The Ware for July 2021 is shown below.

For well over a year now, I haven’t traveled much further than 10km from where I sit and write this. However, sometimes the world brings you interesting things. This ware has a little bit of a story behind it; it arrived, and of course I popped off the cover to see what was inside. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting to see — more on that, after we’ve given some time for people to share their guesses! I imagine this could be a fairly easy one to guess, as most of the components involved in its core functionality are in this view.

The Ware for June 2021 is an Amplifier Research AR200L 200W linear power amp. This is the last (for now at least) of the very fine set of wares that Don Straney had contributed. Thanks, Don! They helped get me through the pandemic, until I can travel the world again and stumble across new wares. Unfortunately, the delta variant means any hope of travel in the near term is probably off the table. But! I still have a screw driver, so I’ll be scouring my place for interesting things to photograph and share.

I’ll pick Phantom Deadline as the winner for last month’s competition, congrats and email me for your prize! I found the comment thread to be very interesting to read; I’m a decade too young to have learned how to design with vacuum tubes in college, and I never picked up tube design later on. For me, at least, I had no idea what I was staring at when I saw the ware initially. So, I appreciated the discussion of vacuum tube RF design tricks. Thanks to everyone who commented, for teaching me new things!

The Ware for June 2021 is shown below.

This is, I think, the last from the Don Straney collection (thank you so much for helping to bridge me through the pandemic!). Maybe I’m showing a bit too much here to make it hard to guess, but, honestly, I had never seen the inside of one of these types of things before, and I probably never will in person; so I wanted to share more than less of its construction details. It’s kind of crazy what a rat’s nest it is on the inside; I particularly love the tiny loops of wire which I’m pretty sure are meant to serve as inductive elements, and not just jumpers.

For email subscribers, apologies in advance if you get two copies of the Name That Ware post series this month — I’m still trying to sort out some new email client configurations. I’m guessing it’ll take a few tries before everything works right.

On to the Ware — looks like I left a little too much text in on this one! Taylan Ayken got the exact model and make, a 256-channel Net Amps 410 from Electrical Geodesics. Congrats, email me for your prize!

Whenever you hear things like “256 channels” these days it’s easy to assume it has to be all integrated into a single chip. But, then you come across gems like these and you’re re-assured that the technique of the board-level integration of hundreds of channels is still alive and kicking, despite the best efforts of Moore’s Law to integrate everything into a single epoxy blob.

Somehow, this didn’t get posted when I hit the post button, and I never noticed! I just saw that the new ware was up and assumed this went through as well. Sorry about that!

The boards from April 2021 were from a Bruker NMS120 benchtop NMR analyzer — according to the contributor of the ware, they “generate RF output to the power amp, digitize (downconverted) RF input, and generate some extra control signals”.

I’m always pleased when I manage to blur a logo just enough that you can’t Google image search it, yet it’s somehow recognizable to humans. Someday machines will beat us at this game but, for now, maybe there’s still a place for human experience vs merely large training sets thrown into a DNN!

Picking a winner is much harder this month. Because I don’t know the much larger system-level context from which these come, I can’t know if Willmore’s final guess is correct or not (but perhaps Don Straney can weigh in). Absent that bit of information, I found Zebonaut’s insights about the cultural biases of German PCB design to be really insightful. I can usually pick out a Japanese-made board based on stylistic decisions, but until now I hadn’t heard such a nice summary of some of the biases and preferences of German PCB designers. So, I’ll give the prize to Zebonaut for that bit of insight, along with a generally correct guess on the make and genre of the ware, which I’m unable to resolve further due to my own ignorance. Congrats, email me for your prize!