I had the pleasure of Morgan Jones visiting me today. We’d discussed for some time a meeting and I was looking for the right time. August looked to be it as I was taking some days off work before the arrival of our next child.
Morgan had planned to ride in his bike into London. What could have gone wrong? Well, after more than two months of hot weather and no rain, we had a classical British rainy day. He arrived completely drenched in his leather bike gear.
Oh well, it all went uphill after that. We listen to Tom Waits on the new setup after the DHT shootout held yesterday.
We decided to test several instruments which Morgan had an interest in: the eTracer and the Lucky Curve Tracer. We spent probably more time tracing characteristic curves of some depletion FETs. I must admit we struggled with Locky’s tracer, mainly because is quite clunky and I never got around reading all the instructions to get the script tracing to work well for all type of FETs.
Lunch break was some basil-topped pizza and a strong ale for me. Morgan didn’t drink as he was cycling back. We discussed Morgan’s plan for new books and ETF, that was interesting. In particular as am attending ETF this year and taking my system for the shootout!
We had some nice berries for desert and back to business.
We spent more time playing up with a pair of Sowter 9062i I wired up for 1:8 step up to hopefully increase the output of the ODAC stage. We found out that the Sowter presented a nasty dip at about 28kHz in this configuration. We tried different Zobel arrangements and load resistors without success. Clearly we couldn’t replicate the FR presented by Sowter. @Brian Sowter, clearly need to fix this!
However, the SUTs worked well in 1:4 arrangement and provided a nice flat output to 50kHz (-3dB) when source resistance was at least 510 ohms. With the low Zo of the silicon DAC, I was going to need at least a 510 ohm resistor in series with the primary to get the right response.
I’m summarising a long day, but what can I say. Morgan is a wealth of knowledge and experience. More than anything, he’s a great man and I could have spent the entire day listening to him.
Hope we can repeat in the near future!
I am hoping that an iconic British figure like Mr. Jones would ride the iconic British bicycle: THE MOULTON!
I have never owned one but I do admire them. Perfect for the English topography. The hills here are a little too steep for a MOULTON to climb gracefully.
Would have loved to have heard this conversation.
My bad Rick, he rode not cycled. He came down with his Yamaha bike (can’t remember the model though). Although I must admit that a Moulton would have been nice. Probably he’d have arrived more drenched than he did!
A fantastic conversation and day together, indeed.