Electronic Test Equipment Qs

It heated the lab I was in quite efficiently.

 

Patrick, since you are starting to mess around with tube circuits, I only have one comment: B+ voltage.



Tom

 

Your very welcome Pat. You will use this thing everytime you fix something. Replacing caps is about the only thing left in cursory repair of most electronics or your up against what you posted about with the surface mounts. Thats just not fun though as most of us are half blind.
Get the ESR kit it's fun and easy and the pcb is very high quality and takles solder perfectly. It will last 20 years.
Its a precision low ohm meter. You won't know how you lived without it.

As far as caps in the stuff your talking about not many lectro's in those things but you still cannot go wrong replacing any in there as a maint thing.

One of my co-worker's, the microwave-high power vhf transmitter engineer is a very hard core ham. He is a brilliant nut job like most lifetime hams. He loves showing me pictures of ham antenna farms all over the world.
Have you ever seen the antenna farm by the owner of Rhode & Schwarz fame in Sweden. OMG it looks like a Nazi WWII radar facility. Like 200 ft high & motorized.
I'll see if I can get a photo or link.

 

Hey Pat check these sites out. I got a little mixed up with all the stories my buddy tells me. The most serious antenna is owned by a group of guys in Finland mostly headed by the owner of Nokia Marti Laine OH8X.

Ulrich Rohde's rig is no slouch for sure and his bench with every piece of R & S equipment is ridiculous.

The other link is from a very serious ham named Zach Reynolds of RJ Reynolds fame. His life story is amazing and my buddy was at his house as a young teen and saw first hand all his amazing radios and antenna's and world class power transmitters. A multi millionaire who ended up getting killed in a small plane crash after swearing off flying in small planes for years as it was so dangerous.
An absolute amazing life.

The sad story is my buddy has been talking to a US Soldier stationed in Afghan who was one of the eight who were killed recently by the guy who opened fire at that meeting.
Very sad as my friend has been talking to him over the air for over a year. The soldiers name was James.

DJ2LR Munich Germany

Radio Arcala

Check out all the thumbnail pictures on this site. Check out his
vintage high powered transmitters and gear:
Zach Reynolds, heir to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Fortune, lived the American Dream.#

Enjoy!!

 

Nice scope. 350 mhz. Love it. Workhorse.

We have a bunch of 2465's at work. We lost a few to the dreaded v/h drive jungle ic failure which is nla.
There they sit.
There's thousands of those dead scopes out there with that chip blown. I lost one on a 2465 I owned years ago and it pissed me off so bad I swore never to buy another Tek scope again. Thats didn't last long though! HA! But I still prefer my Sencore but its only a 100 mhz scope. But its trigger circuits are superior.
Its been a while but its one of the very big ic's on the top board and it gets hot as sh*t and has no heatsink. A well placed heatsink on that device will extend your new scopes life many years.
If not sure which one let me know as I have the print to it.

 

I'm always happy to see a member of the extended family get a new home where it is useful and appreciated.

 

I was employed there, at the facility that inherited the 3325A and developed the 3325B. But I was on a different product line.

 

Yes that's the chip. Really common. We have a stack of them at work with blown U800's.
That sink looks good Pat. Don't forget the grease. You just saved its life!
Good Luck.

BTW, ,.my ham buddy has been on a real tear lately buying up all the all
broken HP Freq counters he can find on eBay. There's alot of them lately with error 5 which appears if you enter the wrong front panel inputs. People think the counter is broken and sell them. Also he found a source to replace a front end component that's commonly damaged on these units that's also nla.
There the same vintage as your func gen you have. Excellent vintage for that gear. Very expensive gear going for peanuts. Just need a little lovin'.

 

Not a fan of the tek scopes at all. I love my Agilents though I also have a couple of Rigol scopes that work great. They have the same trigger circuitry as Agilents, and for $400 quite a steal. 2 channel, 100MHz, and pretty high memory depth.

 

Which ones do you like? I'm in the market for a new used scope.

Tom

 

It depends greatly on what you want to spend and what hole you are trying to fill. Do you just need an auxiliary scope for low duty-cycle usage but every now and then you need more channels? Or are you replacing your current scope with one you plan on keeping until it dies?

[Images below are shamefully stolen from across the googly-webs]

I have an Agilent 54624A which I use all the time. I pretty much learned on this scope, so I am very familiar with it. The memory depth is awesome, even if it is only 100MHz. Downsides are that it is a monochrome screen, so all the traces look the same. I don't find it a big deal, but some people really like the coloured waveforms. The other slightly annoying thing is that when scrolling the trigger time mark, it moves in relation to what time base you are currently zoomed to. So if you are at 50ns/div and you turn the wheel it moves around the 50ns divs great. Zoom out to 500ms/div and it zooms around those great. Leave it pre-triggered at 250ms before 0, and zoom in to 50ns/div again and your turning the wheel only changes the 250ms offset by nanoseconds every turn... So you have to zoom out, scroll in your trigger, then zoom back in. Other than that, works perfectly. Minor gripes, but the only ones I have. And I love the signature floppy-boot sound every time you turn it on.



I also have a MSO7034 which is a beast. I love this thing. First off, they got the dimensions perfect! Its only about 6 inches deep and it has a 10 or 12 in colour screen (not touch though). That means on your standard table, desk, laboratory bench, whatever, it will fit nestled at the back, and your project infront. With the standard scope shape, you need to offset your work. So the scope is off to the side, angled with your project off to the other side and you inbetween. But this thing is genius. Of course all the waveforms are a different colour. It also has built in decoding of SPI/I2C/USB/RS232/NTSC and everything else. I have never seen it miss a trigger just like my other agilents and other agilents I have used. I have seen corner cases that fool a Tek though, so until I see an Agilent skip a beat, I trust them much more than a Tek. When I setup an experiment to single trigger over the weekend on error I want to be darn sure that it will trigger on error, on not miss it. Anyways, my version is 350MHz and the memory is just unbelievable. You can have it zoomed out to 2ms/div shoot it 1MHz I2C traffic then zoom in to see the actual curved waveforms at 200ns/div or less. It boggles the mind. If you can afford it, BUY it.



If you just want cheap thrills and a backup or aux scope, I highly recommend the Rigol line. I am not sure if you know or if they really want it out there, but the Rigol circuitry is Agilent circuitry. Basically Agilent in their infinite wisdom decided to make a competing scope for the low end market. Something under $2K new, which for Agilent is crazy talk. So they contracted out to a chinese company to get the cheapest they could. But if they are having the Agilent name on it, it better work like an Agilent. So basically they gave Rigol their top secret mojo triggering and memory buffering circuitry. The entire soul of what makes an Agilent an Agilent... Rigol comes back and gives them a scope. Agilent then takes this 100MHz scope with 8MB of memory depth and software limits it to 50MHz with 512KB of memory depth. They have other models in the 50MHz and 100MHz range that range from 512KB to 8MB, but the price just goes up and up for each one. The hardware is exactly the same, but they just limit how you can use it. So Rigol decides to get in on the action and abandons Agilent. They sell the hardware Agilent contracted them to make with their own firmware but sell it at the full 100MHz with 8MB depth for $300USD. Whaaaaa?!?!? They have since increased the price to around $400 or $450. But really, you can't go wrong. The interface is not snappy or intuitive or even look good like an Agilent. But it performs exactly the same because it is. They even have MSO's for like $800 or so.

I have 1 Rigol and have talked 2 other friends into getting them. They don't have any fancy decode and really are no better than my old 54624A except that they have USB storage instead of floppy which really comes in useful. However, a used 54624A costs many times more than a new Rigol and they are pretty much the same. I prefer my oldschool Agilent's interface, but it works for all scenarios a 100MHz scope would.