I'm envious of the soldering station. What's it for?
Just realized you can't even see the actual soldering station so you probably meant the rack of test equipment :) It's "general lab stuff" -- old oscilloscope (which I think the trigger is messed up on? I need to investigate), a few power supplies, and a signal generator. I'd like a nice multimeter and a logic analyzer too but I haven't had reason to ask for them yet. Maybe soon, though, if things keep up this way. One of the other research groups I work with works at the university's "electromagnetic compatibility" lab which is about half a warehouse out in the middle of nowhere and goddamn do they have some fancy stuff out there.
Thanks! It's an import but it gets the job done just fine so I have no material complaints with it. It's for "science" -- sometimes my lab does hardware-heavy projects so we use it for assembly/modifications/rework/etc. There's also a nice reflow oven next door if we need to make any surface-mount boards. Here we're using it to make some shielding boxes for a serial communications link that needs to happily survive a test chamber that can produce electric fields up to 175 kV/m -- so what would normally be a pair of wires attached to a board is now a fiber-optic transceiver, a big shielding box with ferrites on all the data and power lines, and three coax lines carrying power, transmit, and receive to the actual device in the test chamber.