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Heathkit IO 12

Hello list.

New here and very much a tinkerer so hope you'll bear with me. Just came by a Heathkit io12 scope. The previous owner already warned me that it will generate an internal sine wave but that it doesn't seem to see external signals.

Of course I wanted to see for myself. I wanted to look at the output of my stereo and thought that I should be able to connect one of the spkr wires to the vert input and gnd and set everything to ext. input.

No luck but I'm not even sure I'm doing the right thing. Can anybody help/

Thanks Nick

Reply to
nickc
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The guy gave you a broken 'scope. Either learn to do electronics repair, give it back to him, or maybe put it on ebay for parts.

Good Luck! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

I assembled an "IO12 " about 45 years ago !

I think there is a bit of mis-communication here "will generate an internal sine wave" Really means "the Horizontal Sweep Oscillator" is working ! SEE "You can see the Horizontal Trace"! (Everything else seems to work, High Voltage for the Beam, Horizontal Sweep Oscillator, Horizontal Deflection Amplifier)

The Vertical Amp is Dead if you can't Expand the Trace Vertically !

I suspect the VERTICAL DEFLECTION AMPLIFIER is dead, if you can't Center the beam Vertically, (a P-P 12BH7), across the CRT Vertical Plates

Fixing a Scope is a bit like repairing a Broken Soldering Iron! You need one to fix one !!

In this Day and age, I would Google "Sound Card Oscilloscope" and build one! (just a Probe and some Resistors and Capacitors and not much else ) except for the Software, to troubleshoot your "IO12", but then you would now have a working "Waveform Monitor", and why would you need the "IO12" except for Its' Calibrated, Vertical Sweep, and Gain Functions.

Yukio YANO

Reply to
Yukio YANO

If you have a system that will run real-mode DOS (Win9x or earlier), you can use a handful of resistors to build an 8-bit ADC (or DAC) that will work with my Daqarta for DOS. You can check out the contruction details at

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You can download Daqarta for DOS at

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Download the "Basic starter package" DQA.ZIP and (farther down the page) the LPTX driver LPTX.ZIP.

You can get a FREE license key for Daqarta for DOS just by requesting it on the Contact Us form (links on every page).

If you have a more modern machine, you can use Daqarta for Windows

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This is free to use for 30 sessions / 30 days, after which it will no longer accept external input signals unless you have a license (but the free signal generator always works). A license is US$ 29 for personal or hobby use, and is good for all future versions.

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v3.50 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

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Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, FREE Signal Generator Science with your sound card!

Reply to
Bob Masta

Thanks everybody.

The vertical gain pot does increase the amplitude but the scale switch for the vert. input seems to be broken. Guess I'll open it up and see what's up with that before I do anything else.

Reply to
nickc

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