Where to but a floppy drive for a TEK544 O-Scope?

It might possibly need some jumper settings changed. I believe small diskette drives still have some options that PCs don't use. But most likely, Tek uses it right out of the box. Look at the connectors on it... it won't cost much at all to *try* a PC diskette drive.

I would suspect it is. What's the extra profit for Tek in making a special drive, that'll sell in the tens of thousands (?), when they could stick a PC one in for $10, and have change left.

This is a good point. I believe the interface on the drives was originally designed around the idea of using jumpers to select the drive. But on the PC, IBM jumpered all drives for the second channel, and flipped the cable around before it got to the drive that was supposed to be on the first channel, so that it would fulfill that function even with the jumper in the second position. I remember having to change this some when salvaging some high quality half height drives out of an old CPM machine (and then briefly bringing it up again with an IBM-labeled full height drive).

What I don't know is if the cheap modern 3.5" drives still have the jumpers, or if they are all hard wired for the second channel. If so, and TEK uses the jumper option, you could use an old PC-style floppy cable as a guide for which wires to swap to get it working.

Silly question but are you sure it is supposed to be PC compatible format..?

Take the drive out and have a look at it - I'm sure there will be a makers name somewhere - probably TEAC or Sony. Note that link settings may differ from those needed in a PC.

If it is head alignment, this is not usually too hard to adjust - there will be a couple of test points on the drive's PCB to monitor the differential head signal, which can be peaked using a known-good disc while adjusting the alignment.

I don't know the vintage of this scope but could it be a non-high density (720K) one ? This would llikely cause problems interchanging if you used a HD disk with it. Easy way to tell would be to look to see if it has a switch to detect the density hole (other side to the write-protect one) .

I read in sci.electronics.design that Mike Harrison wrote (in ) about 'Where to but a floppy drive for a TEK544 O-Scope?', on Wed, 17 Aug 2005:

... and remember that 'double density' (720 K) is not as dense as 'high density' (1.44 M).

Nope. FAT12. Many a time I've popped the floppy disk out of the scope and into a Windoze box to import the CVS files into Excel.

If you couldn't, it wouldn't make much sense to have a floppy. . . I did have to clean the heads of the drive in the scope now and then.

Is there any reason to suppose that it's not an ordinary Sony or Panasonic floppy drive, which might be worth $15 or so brand new?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

"Ken Taylor" wrote in news:aVMMe.3567$ snipped-for-privacy@news.xtra.co.nz:

I am not certain this is true for the TDS scopes.

Thanks for all the feedback from everyone. For the record, this type of scope is more than happy with a 1.4MB windoze floppy.

It appears this particular floppy writes on the "ragged edge" of alignment. Some PC's can see the floppy, some can see the directory, and a chosen few can actually get data off the drive.

I've got my lab buy querying Tech for a drive. I've also got my eyes on an old Tech monochrome scope which has a working drive. I figure a drive swap may be in order.

Looks like I have several options. If I learn anything from this I'll post some info.

Tektronix uses a proprietary format which isn't compatible with PC's. No hardware difference at all.

Ken

So it appears. The Tex stuff we've had in various places were proprietary, but I guess they've learnt a lesson.

Cheers.

Ken

And neither are as dense as some of the of the trolls around here. :(