Test Equipment Anonymous

A good haul. Did you have a stall there? There was one gent selling SAs I thought might be you, but he said he wasn't Robert, and another bloke with his wife selling a lot of high end stuff, for a rally, but I didn't ask his name. I came back with a BC348-H (WWII USAAF receiver) in a nice state for ...

Tektronix 475 with DM44 is a nice combination. That's still my go-to when possible at work. Unfortunately, that also does speak to the test equipment situation at work though given it is 2025 after all. Around 1980 I had a colleague who'd worked in production in a burglar alarm factory a few years ...

It has a strange IC, part of a controller rather than an integrated controller like the ICL7126 family. FFI, see the manual. Can't hold that against Fluke; clearly they were pushing the available technology. Those 40 pin ICs were were used for control and display. They used them in several designs....

I've little appetite for polishing a boring 3.5 digit turd - and improving this is definitely whack-a-mole territory. A working 3.5 digit bench DMM is OK. It doesn't run out of battery. If it doesn't work, it's in dustbin territory. However the processor is the same as used in better models, so if ...

So are the prized by some CRO's of yesteryear yet their addition cost of ownership now is keeping them going..... They have a savage grandeur which many find fascinating. Valve scopes are probably now a bit too savage for most. Not all of us have the time to fix tools in order to finish a project.....

I've little appetite for polishing a boring 3.5 digit turd - and improving this is definitely whack-a-mole territory. A working 3.5 digit bench DMM is OK. It doesn't run out of battery. If it doesn't work, it's in dustbin territory. However the processor is the same as used in better models, so if ...

Based on this thread, shouldn't we declare Fluke products as a crap shoot..... Gimme a mo to grab my hat and coat.... We are talking about bench DMMs about 50 years old, which were probably designed with a design life of maybe 10 years in mind. Then they sold for $$$s painful and now are bought for...

At the same event I paid £10 in cash money for a sort of assured working Fluke 8600A. You were there when I bought if. It sort of worked but the bottom segment of each LED display didn't light. That was fixed by wiggling the flex connector to the display. It may be a dry joint. Then it played up wit...

I bought the SDS1102CML+ pre-Covid, maybe 2018. It's small and neat and it's the one I've reached for. There a few things it doesn't do, such as serial decoding, and the channel 2 trace is a dark blue, which made it hard to see, so I've just bought a better one. I never had to use the FFT facility f...

It is rare[1] that newer equipment is worse than existing equipment, of course. It was poor judgement to say the least. Such highly visible poor judgement can colour marketplace perceptions for a long time ("bad then, why should I expect it to be good now" or "I'm not going to risk m...

The SDS1000 DL, CML and CML+, must have been introduced a long time ago. 15 years back or so. They were introductory models. You can certainly argue that it was poor judgement to include an FFT feature that was basically useless. The recently introduced SDS800X HD series look like the oscilloscope b...

There are all sorts of features it's easy to add to a DSO, such as voltage readings of various sorts. They are useful because you are often interested in voltage levels on a scope and they save you squinting at the display and fiddling about to refer to the scales. They are not as accurate as a chea...

Then you could go to a FFT exclusive display and examine the menu for axis scaling and markers to place on peaks although I'm not sure if the DL models provided them. So modern Siglent equipment is like 1960s SAs and significantly more primitive than 1970s SAs? Disappointing. Not at all. These fair...

So it's basically just eye candy? :roll: My crusty old eyeballs are better TE. Something they felt they could bung in, and would add to the attraction, and they could mention on the data sheets. Certainly not a well-developed feature. I don't think many reviewers caned the scopes for not having an ...

No scales?! Seriously? April 1st is long gone. :D That's prehistoric, or at least early 1960s. Even my 1970s and 1980s analogue spectrum analysers (Tek492, DP8562) have comprehensive readout of all the settings! It reminds me of those little scopes that came out in the 50s, where there wasn't much ...

From fiddling with mine, I came to the conclusion that it's a feature with window functions which produces a trace that looks a bit like an FFT display. There's not much to control it, and working out what the horizontal and vertical axes represent would be hard work or guesswork. It doesn't have th...

I've got a Siglent SDS1102CML+, about the same vintage as your SDS1052DL. It's better spec'd and may be a bit later. I played with the FFT function and was never very impressed or saw it as particularly useful. I may not have discovered how to drive it properly, but it seems to be a bit limited. Sor...

We've been trying to persuade him that he can't expect to get anywhere with his totally inadequate TE or his crusty old eyeballs. He thinks we are pulling his leg or maliciously leading him down rabbit holes. Perish the thought. I'm sure as an experienced Siglent salesman and self-confessed TE enabl...

You guys kill me. Suggesting I go down all sorts of rabbit holes. My Siglent SDS1052DL does have some basic FFT functions but I trust my crusty old eyeballs. :P :P :D I'm shocked that you so readily believe that your e-friends are trying to mislead you. These are not rabbit holes and it's nothing l...

Calibration was a bit fiddly but finally fell into place. Will burn-in for at least 2 hours then this project is complete. Oh no it isn't! Not until the spectral purity of that sine wave is checked out on a spectrum analyzer! No gots a spectrum analyzer. My tired old eyeballs are good enough. :D Yo...

Finally got some time to change out the remaining capacitors. It was a real chore to get to them on the range switch but I was ultimately successful. Changed out C6, C7, C8, C12, C13, C14. So this was nothing to do with silver mica capacitors. It was other capacitors setting the ranges. Were they p...

Interesting. I don't recall seeing the Tek portable scopes on my travels.

It looks as if some of the push buttons have been in the wars.

I'm sure you'll get it working. If it proves hopeless there has to be more than £10 worth of usable parts in it.

I assume you are not in a rush. I'm off on holiday for a fortnight on Thursday. I'll contemplate it.

It would really have to be picked up and seen working. I have the impression you live around Cambridge, or at least roughly in the East Anglia area.

It depends what you mean by cheap. Cheap and HP 8920 don't usually fit easily in the same sentence, in my experience.

Mass replace the capacitors on the range switch including the disc capacitors on the board except for the micas on the range switch. Have you priced mica capacitors lately? Holy shit. :shock: No fix? Is the problem the same on all ranges? If so it would be possible all those capacitors have conspir...