Wavetek 23 croaks, anyone know of "notorious" falure areas?

What smoked, the Wavetek or the Amp? Sounds like a cap let loose.

You need to put the smoke back in.

No, the DUT. It didn't appreciate several amps of near-DC current. So it'll be a weekend project then, check the power supply caps, trace stuff from synth to final amp and so on.

Unfortunately there's already a nasty one on the list for Saturday, a stringer on some outside stairs has rotted out.

Dang, I opened the window and it's gone :-)

The old Waveteks are getting, well, old.

I just got a couple of B&K 4003As. Nice box.

John

You should see the old Boonton Megacycle Meter here. It's this one:

Yes, although I hate to throw out stuff that could (reasonably) be repaired and I need a function generator only once in a blue moon.

Hey, it's Livermore Swap meet this Sunday.

To say I'm not a fan of Wavetek puts it mildly. Their stuff breaks often.

The first problem is that it was made by Wavetek. About 90% of the junked test equipment at Microdyne was Wavetek.

Luckily, I had a HP 3325B on my benches.

Well, mechanically the units do not make a very good impression. Electrically they are usually ok. Ok, was, for this one :-(

Maybe time to look for something better soon. A PC-driven "faceless" box would be just fine for the lab here. All I use it for is as a signal source, no need for fancy external triggering and stuff.

I first used Wavetek equipment almost 30 years ago. I used it once, and shoved it to the corner of the workbench. It was a so called alignment system for CATV equipment. I could do a better job by watching the output on a good TV. :(

In all fairness though, this Model 23 has been good to me. Allows all sorts of fancy tricks, FM, AM, triggering. I rarely used those features but they did come in handy on a pulsed laser project. The spectrum looks quite clean. The only peeve for me is the sub-par mechanical quality. I don't like plastic-studded BNC jacks where the whole board rocks because it resides loosely inside two slits. It just doesn't have the cast-iron "HP feel".

Or HP's repairability.

Not to mention their amazing agilence and avagod-like nature.

And Carly is now running for a US Senate seat :-)

I'm thinking that largely destroying a company's culture and nearly running it into the ground sound like good qualifications to be a politician...

While I'm certainly not a Carly fan, HP was on that trajectory long before she came on the scene.

Being able to largely just go with the status quo ought to help her qualifications as a political candidate too? :-)

Point taken, though -- Tektronix largley imploded as well, without any one particular CEO to serve as whipping boy...

Apple's a pretty amazing/rare case of a phoenix (named Steve Jobs) rising from the ashes of near-irrelevancy.

They should start talking to their customers more. I've filled out numerous surveys for them. From those, they could have seen that I haven't bought a Tek product in a long time. The smart thing would have been to pick up the phone and have a chat, ask why. But no ... so I don't participate in their surveys anymore, makes no sense to me.

They could have found some interesting things. For example that it doesn't make sense to sell a DSO with a paltry 4k sample memory where Asian mfgs are already eating their lunch by providing several times more.

He does have the right instincts. But IMHO it's more stuff for nerds and consumers who like new toys all the time. And there's plenty of those :-)

Oh yeah, it's what drives the economy these days...

If all your neighbors were like you -- fixing anything that had a pretty simple fix when it broke, only buying new cars/computers/TVs/etc. when the old one actually wore out, etc... what kind of economy would that be? :-) I mean, I'd like to think we'd expend all our then-extra human capital on, I dunno, finding a cure for cancer or feeding the hungry or something, but I'm kinda dubious how likely that'd be...

Detroit's nightmare: An elegant elderly lady in front of Costco, loading upscale food items into an Austin Healey. Her first car, she bought it used in 1961, still looked almost like new. "I guess it'll survive me ..." she said.