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

AFAIR it had seat belts retrofitted in, just like I did that with my old Citroen. But no airbags, of course. With vintage cars you always take a risk but obviously she has managed driving without a major accident for almost 50 years.

No, never seen it. But now that we get the THIS-TV channel over the air we might catch it one day. They have lots of classic movies and about every 2nd one sticks, meaning the DTV signal doesn't pixelate.

Jim Jones did pretty well for a while too. He just didn't market his brand of soft drink as widely as Steve has.

Nah, I much prefer black. White suit? In fact, suit? Yeah, I do have a go-to-interview only suit hanging up in the closet. Yep, black. ;-) I guess it has been off the hanger once since I interviewed for my present job; my mother's funeral.

It was a good movie, though older than I am. I remember watching it in the '60s on the Late Late Show.

case

unschatched?

Didn't you work at IBM? At least it used to be that everyone had to wear a dark-blue suit. With tie, and that alone would drive me nuts if doing engineering work.

case

unschatched?

you

They were paying me to, anyway, for 32 1/2 years. Now they're just paying me. ;-)

When I started I wore a sports jacket to and from but never at work and even that didn't last long. Within a year the jacket and tie were gone forever. I don't believe I ever wore a suit to work at IBM. Suits were reserved for weddings and funerals only. ...and that was limited to one a year. ;-)

My first Wavetek function generator, circa 1981, had a 50 ohm output that blew up when I put 50 ohms on it. Had to replace the output transistors with something much beefier, which slowed down the edges--but at least the power supply could drive the 50 ohms!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

UT

es

I had worked at a place where they bought a lot of used Wavetek gear. Doing some investigation, it seems the bean counters preferred to keep the assets of the company low, favoring to repair the junk since repairs could be expensed.

HP made a fair amount of junky function generators too. The problem is it is too easy to make a function generator, so there are too many players. I liked those old Stanford Research generators. They are rarely seen surplus, but cheap enough to buy new.

=20

=20

=46or all equipment, first round from the shotgun, replace all large = power semi's and all large electrolytics, and anything that looks burnt. It is still a matter of track record, the power parts go first. Next, diagnose the frequency problem; it won't be worth a damn until fixed.

Ouch! That doesn't exactly speak to the competence of the guys who designed it. Or maybe they didn't do design reviews?

I loved using the 3325 to test the integration time of our AGC systems. The shorter time intervals were easy. The longer ones no longer required measuring the time period and calculating the frequency. The longest were 10 or 100 seconds, depending on the model.

It was also a breeze to use in measuring the -3 dB points on our video amplifiers. You could do in 30 seconds what took ten minutes with the Wavetek crap.

Huh? The Wavetek here can do millihertzes and you can set the display to time or frequency. Well, at least until a few days ago ...

I have a Wavetek 193. Excellent generator, but then the output stage died. Same damn thing, driving a load at high amplitude...then suddenly not driving it.

The output stage is an AC coupled RF follower using 2N3866 and 2N5160, one set to drive and two pair for output. (An op-amp controls bias, including "DC" output signals.) They all have heatsinks, but TO-39 isn't renouned for heat dissipation.

Here's a picture of the layout. Schematics are on BAMA, IIRC. This is actually some guy's 191, which has the same main board as the 193, and looks the same as mine used to. Now I have two ugly TO-126 transistors on small heatsinks where the four outputs used to be. Risetime sunk to an appalling

Tim

The output on mine has never let me down. But somehow the transmission blew up :-(

and=20

:-)

=20

the old=20

mean,=20

dunno,=20

kinda=20

The good old USA went through the principate phase into the decadent phase of empire rather faster than any before it. It may be that both China and India may be on track to do it even faster. Now that is a scary thought.

old

mean,

In California it's even more scary, was on the CBS13 news a couple days ago:

And we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.

It sounds like its still working, but way off frequency.

What sort of clock does it have? Perhaps the crystal is bad, or some nearby component is causing it to go out of spec.

This Model 23 generator is very sick. The PLL works but the uC control seems to be on the fritz. Above 1kHz where it cuts in the 2nd (faster) AC path it's missing half the sine wave. That would be easily fixed but there seems to be a whole lot that croaked. I had done a 12h test with it and this thing is IMHO poorly engineered from a thermal POV. Lots of stuff in there gets very toasty.

and

:-)

ty

the old

=A0I mean,

unno,

kinda

go:

So did you drive me off ASH?

FAIL authority XD

Bawk bawk.