I'm starting to get a bit fed up with having my test equipment blow up just when it's needed. This is the drawback with vintage gear; if it's not used frequently then it can go *bang* the next time you switch it on. It makes for good practice in repairing stuff, but wastes a lot of time which could be better spent doing other things. I think it's time I modernised my test gear. I was just wondering if anyone has any recommendations they can share. Is there a particular piece of test equipment you couldn't live without? Something you're particularly impressed with? I'd be interested to know so I can perhaps acquire said item and thereby reduce the number of explosions I experience.
I have not heard a bad word said about Rigol scopes yet. Siglent do some interesting RF stuff at competetive prices, assuming the quality's good (again, not heard anything to the contrary).
I don't think any of us here truly understand what electrons do, Jan! Boat anchors don't impress anyone nowadays; they're more likely to make one look like some sort of oddball mad scientist who couldn't get laid. ;-) I'm guessing you don't have a TV. Would I be right?
Boat anchors can still be great as they require you to understand better what is being measured and don’t hide things away with abstraction and unhelpful software.
If you only use it on weekends, you'll probably continue to have problems - even if it's only remembering how the equipment is supposed to work.
You'll find that it's connectors, batteries, heaters, indicators, software and personal safety equipment that wear out most frequently. If your test gear includes any of these, maintain them regularly to avoid disappointment.
If you find that you are missing something that you need, address THAT issue.
I know they have their advantages, but they can also tell lies by showing glitches in waveforms that are internally generated by the scope rather than the DUT. For such occasions, it can be very useful to keep an old analogue scope. I've got 13 of 'em!
Some instruments do kick crap out of their inputs. I have an otherwise very nice Krohn-Hite tunable filter box that is hard to use because of its terrible kickout.
Scopes generally don’t do that, because there are vertical amps and attenuators in the way.
However, you do need to understand a little bit about how sampling works. For instance, say you’re looking at a noisy signal. You want to see some more detail, so you start cranking the horizontal scale knob to the right. Everything looks fine until you get past the maximum sampling rate.
The scale keeps getting finer, but the display breaks up completely, turning into a lot of nearly vertical lines. Of course that’s because it’s gone from real-time to equivalent-time sampling, but it’s puzzling the first time you see it. (To the analog-only folks: ET is useful, but requires careful attention to triggering and averaging. )
In general, 1980-2005ish vintage boat anchors really rock, but you have to get the best. Just yesterday I bought a Tek TDS 684C—1 GHz BW, 4 GS/s simultaneously on all four channels, with fabulous knob response. It was $300, about 1.5 cents on the dollar versus new.
When I was at IBM, bought one brand new in the late 90s (probably $20k) and used it for nearly everything.
I’m a big fan of those too, and use them often. I have a very nearly complete collection of sampling and O/E heads, too—just missing the SD-32
50 GHz sampler.
Right now I’m working on a lab amplifier, based on three paralleled SAV-331+ pHEMTs. Characterizing its noise performance is turning out to be a bit of a puzzle, despite a pile of top-of-the-line boat anchors, but I’ll keep that for its own thread.
Very true about specifically the 1% statement. Sidebar, at an earlier employment, we needed to equip a new lab. Guys wanted GHz scopes. When asked if the ever looked at edges faster than 1ns, no one did.
It’s true that there are a lot of relatively undemanding jobs in electronics. You can get on fine with a 200-MHz scope if all you’re doing is PIC and Pi and ham radio and analog TV.
It’s also true that you can often make do with what you have—the most important test instrument is the one between your ears.
In the before times, doctors were much better with stethoscopes than they are now.
But I’d sure prefer a cardiologist who could use tomography and ultrasound over the best stethoscope guy.
And it’s a lot easier finding gigahertz oscillations if you aren’t limited to a 10-MHz scope with scale marks in cuneiform.
Good boat anchors make capability like that very affordable. My lab is full of top-of-the-line gear (over $2M at list price), for which I’ve paid about
2-3 cents on the dollar. (Not counting a few very helpful donations early on.) Of course I have some good newer stuff, such as a two-channel arb, a NanoVNA2, and a logic analyzer with protocol decoding.
It’s a bit old-school-looking, so it doesn’t impress visitors unless they actually know something, and that suits me perfectly well.
But by all means don’t buy any, so it’ll keep being cheap for me. ;)
All which make repair extremely difficult! There are moves afoot in Europe, I believe, to introduce some sort of 'compulsory repairability' law, to enable freelance repairers to fix up stuff that's gone kaput. That would be an excellent idea, given the massive amount of electronics that goes into landfill. Our 'throw away culture' is not doing the environment any favours at all. This is what needs to be focused on, not some garbage about greenhouse gases.
Looks like it was designed in the late 60s! From the date code I believe mine is a 1982 model. It's still listed in the 1987 HP catalog for a list price of $1750. The 8013B is listed at $1650, maybe those prices are swapped. I wonder when they finally stopped selling it. It's quite a bit cheaper than the fully-programmable HP-IB equipped 8112A which listed for $4775.
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