I bought this many years ago, in a fit of madness.
It's a wide band sweep generator intended for CATV testing and it sweeps 1MHz to 1GHz. There are supposed to be birdy markers that come as standard and optional birdy markers which can be fixed frequency or generate harmonics. The marker units were missing. It can be used with an external marker which is a sine wave at 100mV into a BNC socket on the rear. It has a very nice fixed and variable attenuator, for 75 Ohms, which fits in with CATV use. It has BNC sockets for RF out, RF in (from the DUT) and it can be used with its internal wide band demodulator or an external demodulator which feeds into the Demod In BNC. On the rear there are BNCs for Scope Vertical, Scope Horizontal and External Marker. There's a socket for a Pen lift and another socket, fitted with a special plastic plug, which can be used to control the instrument externally.
The signal generator on top was used to provide an external marker.
The rear sockets.
It has an unusual construction where most of the circuitry is plug in modules.
It does work. It sweeps up to 1GHz and I can hear it on a scanner.
It can be coaxed to work at lower frequencies. This is it scanning a 15MHz crystal. The crystal is in the middle of the display, the fuzz to the left is the marker.
The external marker is immensely useful in setting it up, but it still takes safe cracker fingers. It isn't convenient to use at lower frequencies and I have better equipment anyway. Probably, if you wanted to sweep 250MHz either side of 500MHz it would be the business, especially with the built in markers. It has a CW setting where it puts out a fixed frequency, but it isn't accurate enough to use as an RF sig gen.
There were three variants, the 1801A, 1801B and 1801C. There are datasheets on the WWW and I can find for sale instruction and service manuals for the A and B versions. I'm not inclined to shell out money for a manual for this, especially if it isn't for the exact version I have.
There's not a great deal of information out there on them. I found this
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/wavetek_s ... 1801a.html
There are one or two instrument dealers offering them for sale for ludicrous prices. If you were into CATV testing, there have to be better things to spend your money on than something from 1980.
An intriguing bit of junk, which I've had hanging round for a long time. I suppose I should put it on ebay.
Wavetek 1801C Sweep Generator
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Wavetek 1801C Sweep Generator
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