FA: Some nice HP gear from my home lab....

Shit, John, you're selling your stuff!??!! What's going on?

There can only be one answer....a new girl friend! Harry

Short answer: I treat eBay like a giant storage locker, where they pay to keep my stuff while I'm not using it. :-)

Long answer: my usual M.O. is to undertake long-term personal projects in batches of two or three, which often take years at a time. I've recently reached a point in one of those cycles where I'm happy with the results and content to call it all "done" for the time being.

My next big thing is purely software-based, in an entirely-unrelated field. I've already put a lot of work into this project, and it's become apparent that I'm going to have to focus on it to the exclusion of pretty much everything else if I'm ever going to finish it. Because I've got at least another year of software work ahead, it doesn't make sense for me to pay to store a lot of hardware that someone else could be using towards productive/fun ends.

I'm not the least bit happy about giving up some of that gear, particularly the 8566B. But if I keep it around, I will play with it. Historically, that's been a fairly-serious (almost addiction-level) personal problem. It gets in the way of other long-term goals, so I have to take positive, hard-to-undo steps to move ahead.

Watch Gandalf trying to convince Bilbo to give up his favorite toy, and you'll get the idea...

-- jm

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I'm tempted on that TEK 485. I have a working (but UGLY) 454 scope and the 485 is sortof it's smarter brother. The shipping charges from your neck of the woods is a killer though (long distance cross country to FL). I'm not sure if my 454 has the p11 phospher or P2 or P31, would the option be stamped on the nameplate?

I believe that all the 454s had P31 phosphors, going by personal observation and Sphere Research's CRT listings. That's what's in my 'backup' 454 (which isn't for sale).

To some extent it's like trying to prove that no crows are white, though. Tek made some oddball scopes in small quantities over the years, so you can't be too sure what's out there.

-- jm

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We were afraid of that: the dark side, you know.

A real jewel, already up to $3700, with six days to go.

Look on the bright side... maybe all of the other bidders will cancel their bids or get tossed by eBay for various reasons, and you'll get it for $1.00. :)

-- jm

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That would be the day. What's the right price for your 8566B with manuals, etc.? I see Nick at Ridge Equipment has one up for $9k, but I doubt he'll sell it. Looking at the last 30 days, I see one fellow who had two "untested" units, accepting $3100 "best offers" for each, and another guy who got a $2700 "buy-it-now" sale for his "untested" unit with a "dim screen". All three "untested" units had photos indicating reasonable physical condition and some kind of apparently-proper display operation. There's another one, "as is" with a dark-screen photo, starting at $6499, with no bidders.

It's tough to say. At the end of the day it's worth whatever the second-highest bidder thinks it's worth. Ordinarily, I'd wait for all those others to sell or otherwise disappear from the field before putting one up for sale, but I think this one will out-compete the others without any trouble... at least among buyers who know what they're looking for. A dim CRT is not a good thing on these units, because the focus is the first thing to go. By the time the emission is down, you don't get a very clean image.

At any rate, a $9K starting bid on an 8566B with a DOA-only guarantee is just a waste of a listing fee, and everybody's time to boot. Much better to start low and encourage people to look at the item on its merits. I'd be surprised if mine doesn't land in the $6K-$7K neighborhood. $8K-$9K is a high but still-fair price, if someone has the cash on hand and has been waiting for the right one.

That particular 8566B from Ridge does look clean, but it has some serious phase-noise peaking going on. (Compare his CRT image with the same shot in my auction, particularly taking the different reference levels into account.) Even if you paid $9K for his, you'd still want to open it up and poke around the first-LO synthesizer with an ESR meter. Something -- probably something cheap but difficult to find -- is packing up and getting ready to go out to lunch in that one.

-- jm

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So, am I right? John was not surprized (price) and Win is now the owner?

Yikes. This means I have something besides political opinions in common with Win. We both have SA's that John M used to own and spent many hours fixing up for us.

Correct. $6,380 after 16 bids from 12 bidders. I started the bidding at $1.00, "aikidoka.steve" stole it from me with $2.00, and the battle was joined. Last night electron55 took it from calibrate72pb with his $6,280 bid at 18:29:44 and I outbid him one second later, 15 seconds before the auction was to end at 9:30pm EST. My sniper service placed a bid nine seconds later, but it wasn't needed, I was already a winner. :-)

I also grabbed John's 8568A 1.5GHz RF Section for $610.

These beauties will replace my inferior HP 8569B spectrum analyzer.

We've got to stop meeting like this. :-)

As a relative novice electronic nerd what type of work did you do with this equipment, as a hobby?

I can't vouchesafe John's decision to give up his treasured gear, but I can say John's loss is my gain. John's 8566B is a beautiful machine and several of us are having lots of fun with it. My tech is making a new rack for it (and several other machines, together far too big to fit on a bench), then I'll add an ethernet-to-GPIB network connection, software, and it'll be ready for prime time.

Quite a few of the projects at

Glad to hear it's working well. Agreed, its size and weight is a real problem, and not just for shipping. I'll definitely own another of those beasts at some point, when I have more room than I do now. The important thing is that it's in appreciative hands. :-)

If you plan to use my GPIB software with it, be sure to download a recent copy. I hosed the phase-noise app pretty badly in my last "slipstream" update a few weeks ago, and only heard about it last week. The version that's up there now is fine.

Would you be so kind as to post the url for your website? I would like to get a copy of your software.

Thanks, K

See the first link at

I like the part where you get the "number of 1000-ns intervals since 1-Jan-1601 UTC" :-)

The broken version was 1.05, but I "slipstreamed" the fix into the same release without updating the version stamp.

I really should've bumped the version number when I posted the fix, but it'll be pretty obvious if your copy has the bug. It will appear to work, but it will always start the PN sweep at 0 Hz rather than the minimum offset you specify. That makes the sweep take much longer than necessary, and the trace information at offsets below 10x the analyzer's minimum RBW is meaningless.

Basically, if you downloaded it around the time I posted all those auctions, you probably got the bad version.

Heh... I've wondered where Microsoft came up with that; it might have come from the Unix world. There's a lot of weirdness in the calendar business, and it's usually less arbitrary, but more obscure, than it seems at first.

-- john, KE5FX