Crap GadgetsWe wanted a monkey butler and bought one off eBay. Imagine our surprise when we found it was just an ordinary monkey with rabies. Worse: It had no butler training at all. Tell us about your duff technology purchases.
Thanks to Moonbadger for the suggestion
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Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 29 Sep 2011, 12:51)
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TV antennaBought from a mail order catalogue back in the mid 90s when I was young and naïve.
It consisted of a wire where one end could be plugged into the TV. At the other end was a lump of plastic about the shape and size of present day Apple TVs. The claim was that it would offer excellent recption, like having a roof top antenna, but in your living room.
Alas, the reception was horrible and I soon harbored the nagging suspicion that the massive lump of plastic was just that, a lump of plastic encapsulating a wire. For some reason they had not designed any way to open the lump using a screwdriver so I would instead assault said lump with various tools. Eventually I gave up and threw it away.
(, Thu 29 Sep 2011, 14:06, 1 reply)
they contain an RF preamplifier circuit which acts in place of gain-boosting elementsthat you see in a conventional aerial design, i.e. lots of slices of metal in a line providing a resonant path of the signal to the dipole (shape of a squashed staple). I've seen inside one of them and it's just a foil outline on cardboard with a small amp IC- unfortunately the front-end of the TV also has an RF amplifier IC so you're ramping up the distortion by amplifying something that's already been amplified. Which is why they are shite.
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Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 29 Sep 2011, 18:54,
closed)
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