Elektronika MK-61 - today I ordered one NIB

[jebem]

(08-23-2014 09:31 PM)walter b Wrote:  I've got one here for some years. I acquired it for similar reasons but have to admit I never really started using it. Just too strange a surface.

d

Hi Walter!
It surely looks a bit different with all those Cyrillic characters...

My first contact with Russian language was in Africa in 1975, after Mozambique independence, where most of the Portuguese left the country and USSR kicked in by offering cooperation to help developing the new country.

At the time I was starting my professional life working for the military, doing maintenance on western telecommunication equipments, but after the Soviets I had to maintain their equipments too.
So, as a Portuguese that could only understand English and a few words of Afrikaans (friends and schoolmates from South Africa), I faced this new challenge:
How to decode the Russian technical service guides?
There was no Internet in those times...

Once I was in Niassa lake (located in the remote North of the country) repairing a RF long distance transmitter, and the Russians asked me to fix the RADAR of one of their military speedboats. Sure! No problem. I'm the expert on ppi radars.

After a brief diagnostic, I isolated the problem on the receiver oscillator - The Klystron was dead and I had to replaced it. So far so easy.
But then I needed to calibrated it, and for that I would need to understand the Russian written procedures - and that I failed to do.

So I asked a comrade to translate it for me (they could speak un peu de Portuguese): "well...you put your thing at here... then raise that thing up to 60 amperes... wait...maybe not..."

And I thought, what the heck, I'm young and can't think of the consequences of my acts, so I connected the current meter and started the procedures as I found appropriate for the situation, ignoring the Russian papers - well, it worked for brief moments before killing yet another Klystron, and we run out of spare parts.

Because in those revolution times the spare parts were rare and extremely hard to be delivered to remote regions, I was sentenced to stay at the military base for another 4 weeks waiting for the next logistic delivery.

Well, it was not that bad... this military base (search for "Metangula" in Google maps) was located at the lakefront, kind of a paradise (the war was over there), fantastic weather and warm waters.
Hopefully I did brought my shorts and swimming suit, so the time passed just fine!