old test gear

I'm looking for a VNA of some kind, doesn't have to be particularly fast.

Or any type of boatanchor-thing that can do accurate inductance/ESR measurements up to a few MHz, like a real box-thing. These cheap handheld units kinda suck

Yep. A good ol' 547 would make a nice piece of "lobby art". ...Jim Thompson

Service and reference manuals are being archived at Bitsavers.org. They cut off the spine then feed the manual though a double sided reader and convert to searchable PDF. A good place to send manuals that aren't archived somewhere else!

I've scanned a few manuals - mostly Fluke test gear, as have friends of mine and hosted them for years.

John :-#)#

We are moving the company in August (if PG&E finally gives us power) and I have a lot of old test equipment that I'd like to get rid of. Tek, HP, GR, all sorts of stuff. And a zillion manuals and old catalogs.

I figured that I'd spread the stuff out and photograph it all and see if anybody wants any of it. I'd hate to have it all hauled out to landfills.

If you are interested, email me and in a month or so I'll send you the pics.

jjlarkin highlandtechnology com

I'll probably keep a couple of Tek 547 scopes and some plugins. They were really works of art. ====================================================================

After sed and others that you give first crack to, maybe contact some local makerspaces and see if they are interested. If there is some kind of newsletter maybe you could post there if anyone would be willing to pay shipping.

First floor lobby, of course! Every carry one up steep stairs?

Exactly what I was thinking. A lot of print businesses have old Columbian presses in their entrance halls for the same reason. Take a deep breath and check this formidable sucker out:

BTW, I had a lovely old 547 in perfect working order about 12 years ago. Then I *had* to move. I won't say how I had to dispose of it in the end as I'm still suffering PTSD as a result.

Yep. But wasn't too bad. At Moto they were all on TEK Carts. ...Jim Thompson

This is or maybe was in an industrial building that used to make blades for sawmills

It's cool to keep these old things around.

I know, destroying a 547 just doesn't seem right.

I will clean one up and put it on a Tek cart, in the entrace hall of our new building.

d years ago. No-one else would bid because of its size & weight.

NT

I have an HP185 sampling scope that's just as heavy, but really ugly.

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odd years ago. No-one else would bid because of its size & weight.

I tried to find my first scope but no luck. A Tek, similar to a 310 but a f ew less controls. 2MHz I think, I worked on a 6MHz video noise reduction sy stem with it.

NT

It should be a criminal offence!

Er, yes. Just make sure you put a little sign on it saying "classic vintage Tek scope from the 1950s" or something to that effect, lest would- be customers assume it's your latest product!

The entryway will be pretty big, and we're trying to figure out what to put into it. Coat hooks, umbrella things, maybe a couch and a table, a bookshelf, one of those casette coffee machines, maybe line the walls with framed PC boards and posters of particle accelerators and jet planes.

My wife has a little office where she does her speech therapy thing. She has a tiny fridge that she keeps full of beer. The kids' dads like that.

Absolutely. I'm not nostalgic for tube gear, but working stuff is all to the good.

Good luck in your new building!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Those old plugin scopes did things nothing else will do now. One is microvolt sensitivity differential inputs with switchable LF and HF rolloffs. The other was differential comparators with thousands of cm of adjustable calibrated offset and essentially instant overload recovery.

Do I hear your next new product?

Did anyone ever make a laser scope that projected onto the wall? :) There were meters like that, using a focussed lightbulb IIRC.

NT

Bit of a niche, though--nowadays rigging up a nice stable floating offset generator would take maybe half an hour if one was trying to do a nice neat job. That was a lot harder in the tube days.

And sampling scopes have no overload recovery issues, since the vertical amp is behind the sampling bridge.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Any scope with a video output will do that--all you need is a picoprojector.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Some of the Tek plugins would allow you to zoom in the top of a 100 volt pulse, to millivolt/cm resolution, with calibrated offset, with essentially instant overload recovery. Just the input attenuator was a serious challenge. They did it with tube diffamps, VR tube voltage references, and 10-turn pots.

There are some little preamp boxes around that have diff inputs and switchable bandwidth, usually just HF cutoff.

We have one of those, but I haven't had time to play with it. It's nothing like the old Tek plugins.