Originally posted on Dave Mac’s Window on the World: In an amongst the guitar building I decided to break out the soldering iron to build an …
A DIY valve overdrive pedal
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DIY valve overdrive pedal
Tag: EFFECT
Ukraine Attacks Russia Along Northern Front
Sweeping south from positions in the Kharkiv region in Ukraine’s northeast, Ukrainian forces have made their largest gains since routing Russia from Kyiv in April.
Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces have scored the most significant battlefield gains since they routed Russia from the area around Kyiv in April by reclaiming territory in the northeast, according to Ukrainian officials, Western analysts and battlefield imagery.
In his overnight address to the nation Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Ukrainian military had captured scores of villages and large chunks of Russian-occupied territory across Ukraine since the offensive began. “In total, more than a thousand square kilometers of the territory of Ukraine have been liberated since the beginning of September,” he said.
On Friday the Ukrainian military appeared to be moving rapidly to cut off the city of Izium, a critical logistical hub for Russian military operations.
The exact positions of Ukrainian forces in the area around Izium could not be independently established. But satellite data, independent military analysts and photos and videos of Ukrainian forces indicated that they had moved quickly toward Kupiansk, another logistical hub just north of Izium.
The new offensive in the north appears to have caught the Russian forces off guard. On Friday, its Defense Ministry said on Telegram that it was moving troops to reinforce the Kharkiv region, without specifying their numbers or specific locations.
Ukraine’s advances in the northeast sent a shock wave through Kremlin-friendly military bloggers, pro-war cheerleaders who typically call for more aggressive action.
“We need to be honest, the Ukrainian command has outplayed us here,” said Yury Podolyaka, a Ukrainian pro-Kremlin blogger with more than 2.2 million followers on Telegram. He warned that if the Russian forces failed to “stop the Ukrainian breakthrough” in the coming days “this will be the most serious combat defeat” for Moscow.
Ukrainian and Western officials cautioned that the offensive operations were in their early days, that the situation was fluid and that the gains were far from secure. Not all of the claims of advances by Ukraine could be independently verified, and much about the state of the fighting in both the east and the south of Ukraine is shrouded in uncertainty as the government in Kyiv enforces a media blackout, restricting journalists’ access to the front.
For months, Ukraine’s leaders declared loudly and often their intention to launch a counteroffensive in the south, around the port city of Kherson. And they proceeded to batter Russian supply lines, ammunition depots and command centers in the region with precision rockets, while massing troops and orchestrating covert attacks on military bases and Russian collaborators far behind enemy lines.
Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Ukrainian soldiers near the Kherson front this week. Ukraine’s leaders had long declared their intentions to retake Kherson, but said little about the north. Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
But they said virtually nothing about the northeast, until this week.
Accounts from witnesses, the local Ukrainian authorities, Russian proxy officials, geolocated video on social media and satellite footage offered a window into the Ukrainian campaign.
On Thursday, Ukrainian officials said their troops had pushed through the town of Balakliya, less than 30 miles from the city of Izium, which lies close to the Donbas, the contested area of eastern Ukraine that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has vowed to seize. President Zelensky released video of soldiers raising Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag above the town’s administrative building, and other officials posted videos, not all immediately authenticated, of locals coming out to greet the soldiers.
Ukrainian soldiers on Friday posted photos that purported to be in the vicinity of Kupiansk, which has served as the capital of the Russian occupation in the region. The Kremlin-installed head of the city administration, Vitaly Ganchev, urged women and children to evacuate as Ukrainian forces approached.
Mr. Ganchev said the city is under “constant rocket attacks from the armed forces of Ukraine,” according to RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency.
In response to the growing threats in the south, the Russian military redeployed thousands of troops from the Donbas, apparently thinning their defenses in the north and providing an opening for the Ukrainians.
Russia’s seeming inability to secure a key flank near Izium also highlighted its challenge in defending occupied territory along front lines that stretch 1,500 miles from northeastern Ukraine to the Black Sea coast in the south. And the battlefield setbacks seemed to underscore the manpower issues plaguing the Russian army, which the United States estimates has suffered at least 80,000 wounded and killed since the invasion began in late February.
Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
On Friday, some of Russia’s military bloggers voiced dismay over the inability of Russian commanders to prepare stout defenses. Others have demanded an explanation from the Russian military command or other authorities.
Maksim Fomin called on law enforcement to figure out why Russian forces were unprepared for the Ukrainian offensive. “The situation is very diffilcult,” he said. “Let’s exhale and say that we have been defeated.”
Yevgeny Poddubny, a Russian state TV reporter, posted a video of Russian transport helicopters that he said were transferring Russian troops to the Kupiansk and Izium areas, citing Russian defense officials.
Some of the pro-Kremlin bloggers have warned that the loss of large swaths of occupied lands in Ukraine would undermine the “Russia is here forever” message that the occupying authorities have been preaching in order to sway locals to support them.
Occupation forces outside Donetsk this month.Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
While the Ukrainian gains in the north were capturing most of the attention Friday, the southern counteroffensive also made gains, with Ukraine’s Security Service releasing photos of what it said was the city of Vysokopillia, in the Kherson region. That claim could not be independently verified.
Last week, Ukrainian forces reported that they had broken through the first line of Russian defenses in multiple locations in the Kherson region, where they remain engaged in fierce battles to drive the Russians back from well-fortified positions.
Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at C.N.A., a research institute in Arlington, Va., said the campaign in the south did not appear to be a diversion to draw Russian forces.
“These appear to be interrelated offensives,” he said on Twitter on Thursday. “Kherson likely intended as a more deliberate, sequenced advance. Kharkiv to take advantage of favorable conditions.”
Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that Ukraine has made tangible gains in recent days, but he sought to temper expectations for what will probably continue to prove a bloody campaign.
“There is fighting — both offense and defense — all the way from Kharkiv all the way down to Kherson,” he said at a news conference in Germany.
Still, General Milley said the Ukrainians were making efficient use of newly acquired weapons systems to set the stage for their offensive. The American-made HIMARS missile system, he said, has been used to strike more than 400 targets. And it is just one of a number of advanced weapons systems now being deployed by the Ukrainians.
But he emphasized that Russia, although its supply lines were strained and its manpower troubles far from resolved, retained significant advantages in the war.
“The war is not over,” he said. “Russia’s a big country. They have very serious ambitions with respect to Ukraine.”
Authors: Marc Santora reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, Ivan Nechepurenko from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Marco Hernandez from New York. Anna Lukinova contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Alan Yuhas from New York.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/09/world/aeurope/ukraine-russia-kharkiv.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Published on: 9 September 2022
let me in ( a visual paired with audio )
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How to Build a DCR Measuring Tool
build one of the most useful DIY guitar tools.
Welcome back to Mod Garage. After receiving numerous requests to show more DIY tools for guitarists, today we’ll explore one of my favorites. For years I’ve used this one in the shop daily and I’m sure you’ll love it. It’s cheap and easy to build, but very effective for analyzing circuits of electric guitars and basses without opening the electronic compartment or lifting the pickguard. It’s a kind of adaptor or extension to measure a pickup’s DC resistance (DCR) from outside the guitar. After building one, we’ll discuss how to interpret the measurements.
The DCR of a pickup is by far the most common parameter you can read when reading pickup descriptions and often it’s used as an indicator of the output. The reason for this is that it’s easy to measure, but, sadly, it doesn’t tell us anything about a pickup’s output nor its tone. To quote pickup designer Bill Lawrence: “DC resistance tells you as much about a pickup’s tone and output as the shoe size tells you about a person’s intelligence.”
I’ve written about DCR as a pickup parameter in detail and you can read about it in “Mod Garage: Demystifying DCR.”
DCR is not a primary parameter in pickup design. It’s simply the result of the type and gauge of the pickup’s wire, the number of turns, and other parameters like the winding pattern, etc. But it isn’t completely useless, and we can use it as a good reference point for analyzing pickups both inside and outside a guitar or bass circuit. All you need for this is a digital multimeter (DMM). You don’t need an expensive calibrated precision DMM—any entry level DMM will work. You can get a simple digital DMM for $10, but if you want to invest in a better device, it can’t harm.
The easiest way to analyze a pickup is outside a circuit. Simply set your DMM to ohm and connect the two pickup leads to your DMM. If your DMM doesn’t have an auto-range function, set it to 20k ohm. Now you’ll get the DCR reading for your pickup. You can compare it to the factory specs of your pickup and it should be close. If your DMM shows “infinite” or “overload,” you know the pickup wire is broken. Let’s say your pickup should read 7k ohm, but yours reads around 2-3k ohm. Your pickup likely has a short circuit somewhere in the winding. Used this way, the DCR is always good to quickly check if a pickup is alive or not.
To quickly analyze a guitar or bass circuit with one or more pickups, you first need to build the DIY adaptor tool this column is about. There are two different versions, and you don’t need much for this:
- Version #1: This is the quick and dirty version. You need a standard 6.3 mm straight mono plug (the same type on all your guitar cables), some wire of your choice (preferably in two different colors), and two insulated alligator clips.
- Version #2: A more elegant version that you can also use with a scope if you have one. You need the same parts as for version #1, but instead of two alligator clips, you need two 4 mm banana plugs, and the two wires need to be longer than what you’d use for Version #1.
So, heat up your soldering iron and let’s get to building version #1.
- Solder one piece of wire to the HOT terminal of the mono plug and another one to the GROUND terminal. I prefer a red wire for the HOT and a black wire for the GROUND terminal (Photo 1).
- Solder an insulated alligator-clip to each end of the two wires, preferably a black one to the black wire and a red one to the red wire. Ready!
Version #2 is built the same way, but, instead of alligator clips, you solder a 4 mm banana plug to each end of the two wires, if possible, also in black and red. The two wires should be long enough that can place your DMM and/or scope at some distance from the guitar. In Photo 2, you can see version #1 on the top and version #2 on the bottom.
The difference between the two versions is that with version #1 you put the plug into the output jack of the guitar, connecting the two probes of your DMM to the alligator clips: the black probe of the DMM goes to ground (black wire) and the red probe goes to hot (red wire) as seen in Photo 3. With version #2, you need to remove the two probes from your DMM, plugging the two banana plugs directly into your DMM or your scope, also seen in Photo 3.
Both versions work equally well. Version #2 is just easier to operate when you also want to use the adaptor for a scope.
For a quick check, you can also directly touch the hot and ground terminals with the probes of your DMM, but you need both hands or a second person for this if you want to play around with the controls or the pickup-selector switch.
Now we can easily check four things with this tool, assuming everything is connected the way it should be and your DMM is set to ohm and auto-range or the 20k ohm scale if your DMM doesn’t have an auto-range mode:
- Do you receive a reading on your connected DMM? If not, check if the volume pot is fully opened. Do you receive a reading now? If so, close the volume pot completely and see if you still receive a reading. No? Perfect, you just proved that the volume pot is alive and well.
- With a fully opened volume pot and a reading on your DMM, slowly turn down the volume and watch the reading on the DMM. If you receive some crazy reading, chances are good there is a treble bleed network on your volume pot. If the reading slowly goes down to zero, you know that there is no treble bleed network on the volume pot, and you can check if it’s an audio or linear volume pot (plus the taper it has, if it’s an audio pot). Let’s say we have a 500k volume pot. When you close the volume pot halfway and receive a reading around 250k, you know it’s a linear pot. An audio pot, depending on its taper, will result in a much higher reading on the first 50 percent of the volume pot. If you read 500k until the volume pot is almost fully closed, this means the pot has a 90:10 audio taper—exactly the kind of volume pot you don’t want to have. If you read something around 300k in the middle of the volume pot, you know it’s a 60:40 audio taper.
- If the volume pot is fully opened and you don’t receive a reading on your DMM, chances are good that your output jack is broken, not connected, or connected incorrectly. Please make sure there is no activated kill-switch in the circuit that can also cause this “problem.”
- Turning the tone knob(s) will make no difference in the reading you receive. If you receive a slightly higher reading with a tone pot fully opened compared to when it’s closed, you know it’s a no-load tone pot.
There is a lot to discover from just the outside of any guitar or bass. So, now let’s see what we can measure from outside the instrument starting with a Telecaster with a 4-way switch. The readings in all examples are the readings I received with guitars I had in the shop, but they can be different in your instruments:
- Bridge pickup only: 5.85k ohm
- Neck pickup only: 6.76k ohm
- Both pickups together: 3.18k ohm
- Pickup selector switch in position #4: 12.30k ohm
The readings for both pickups are within the factory specs and are in a typical range for a vintage-flavored Telecaster pickup set. With a reading of 3.18k ohm for both pickups together, you know that both pickups are in parallel. With the reading of 12.30k ohm, you know that both pickups are in series with each other.
Here is the simplified math behind these readings:
- Series connection: DCR pickup #1 + DCR pickup #2
- In our example, it’s 5.85k + 6.76k = 12.61k ohm, which is very close to the reading of 12.30k we received. The missing 0.31k ohm are eaten up by the resistance of the pots and the tolerance of your DMM. For this test, I chose the cheapest DMM I could find in the shop. A calibrated high-quality DMM will have much less tolerance.
- Parallel connection: (DCR pickup #1 + DCR pickup #2) divided by four
- In our example, it’s 5.85k + 6.76k = 12.61k ohm divided by four = 3.15k ohm, which is very close to the reading of 3.18k ohm we received.
Now let’s repeat this with a standard Stratocaster:
- Bridge pickup only: 7.07k ohm
- Middle pickup only: 5.88k ohm
- Neck pickup only: 5.70k ohm
- Bridge + Middle pickups together: 3.26k ohm
- Neck + Middle pickups together: 2.94k ohm
All three pickups are within the factory specs of this Strat. We have a slightly hotter bridge and two vintage-flavored pickups. The two in-between positions are in parallel.
Lastly, let’s try a vintage PAF-loaded Les Paul:
- Bridge pickup only: 7.77k ohm
- Neck pickup only: 7.09k ohm
- Both pickups together: 3.74k ohm
Both PAFs have the typical vintage DCR and are in parallel in the middle position.
That’s it. Next month we’ll take a deeper look at changing wires on pickups, which is something I’ve been asked about a lot, so stay tuned!Until then … keep on modding!
by Dick Wacker – PREMIER GUITAR