Re: Reviving Test Equipment After A Long Storage Period

Borrow or buy a variac or poorman's version a lamp socket in series and variety of traditional bulbs 10W to 150W. Flickering bulb, like wavering variac ammeter, often indicates cap problem. remove cover and sniff while powering up.

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

And then if it doesn't work look for lithium batteries maintaining the calibration memory.

My HP 54542A digital 'scope died that way. No error message. It just wouldn't start up.

After replacing the lithium battery and going through the self test and calibration procedure it was fine.

Another potential problem is failing eproms. I bought a vector network analyzer from ebay which turned out to have one flipped eprom bit. I wrote this up on sci.electronics.repair.

The most common problem is probably dried up electrolytic capacitors in switching power supplies. A cheap esr meter is worth its weight in gold as there is often no visible sign of failure. I use a Peak ESR60.

John