Dumpster Tektronix 2465B Restoration

"if you score discarded gear from your workplace, then exfiltrate it immediately, to avoid awkwardness."

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>Among my haul, I got two large logic analyzers, for $5 apiece, free of Dumpster commingling artifacts.

How do you compare such large logic analyzers against something like Salae?

Keep the photomultipliers in the dark when not using. Some can be damaged by ambient light exposure, even when powered off.

In a reasonable country with reasonable laws, something being deliberately put in the trash by its owner should be considered an explicit surrender of ownership, but IANAL.

I wanted to trash dump into the electronics at the local disposal center in Switzerland and they told me I couldn't because they need to destroy the stuff by law and punishable with 10.000 CHF if not. Don't know about an university though.

Would love to do that too, Swiss companies and universities are so wasteful it’s incredible what goes in the dumpster. It doesn’t even seem like universities try to sell their discarded equipment, they just dump it out of access to the public. How do you find these?

It may actually prove to be the opposite case as the capacitors in these old scopes self destruct and eat their own circuit boards and surrounding components.

I have a Rigol and an Agilent over 10 years old now and going strong. Honestly though, my Agilent overheated once and destroyed its own SMPS. This was terrifying given the price of the scope (and at the moment, just knowing -- it was dead and smelled like an electronics fire). I now have a circulating fan on my scope shelf moving air behind and across all my bench equipment.

I replaced that Agilent SMPS for $150? and then got a 2 year service plan for another couple hundred dollars.

The latest Rigol prices are pretty expendable, $299!! but I suspect they will be running for quite a few years.

"guaranteed to work for many years" if you don't need them calibrated I guess.

Also like I'm not sure? A lot of the discrete component and analog stuff on the old models is way more flimsy that the new system on a chip things on the signal path of the new instruments, specially for RF.

Plus if you need data logging it's not even worth to have the discussion on if older gear was better.

I've been to company all hands meetings I would describe as that.

Oh you!

Then I take "Positive level not positive enough", it has the same vibe as "... until morale improves"

A couple of years ago me and my mother were responsible for clearing out my dad's entire collection of equipment accumulated over a career as an electronics engineer. I know much of it had value but there was too much to deal with so we sold a few obvious items and gave away the rest to someone on a local Facebook ham radio group who could drive round and take it all away. There was certainly a Tektronix oscilloscope like this among it! (Along with spectrum analyzers, test sets of various vintages..)

I'm not sure of the best way to find such opportunities, but I bet there's plenty of kit like this getting thrown out when people's affairs are being put into order by their relatives. It gets me to thinking I should add some tips in my will as to where to give away my technical odds and ends(!)

The same for me! My local refuse centre does not allow anything to be sold or given away once it enters the container for disposal. This is for safety reasons, but it is rather sad: reuse > recycling.

You gotta work at the right places :-)

Years ago we senior engineers stood around while an intern was in the dumpster grabbing stuff for us so we didn't have to get dirty. "No, the other gantry: it's got a bunch of really good stepper motors on it," "Yeah, I can find a use for that big slab of aluminum but you can keep the PLC's if you want..."

Seriously, my boss said to me one day "I know you're kind of a pack rat and we're throwing out a robot arm. If you want it, call Facilities and have them load it into your car."

Well it is probably somewhat depatable as to how much one should care about calibration of an CRO, especially today. The precision is somewhat inherently limited by what you can resolve with Mk1 eyeball on the screen. I have an 4 channel Kenwood CRO on my bench that is intentionally completely out of cal as removing the burned out vertical amplifier gain hybrid modules (complete unobtanium, although one might be able to handcraft that as a SMT board with modern components) makes the thing work for some value of “work” (no vertical vernier, the cal position being on the order of 2x off). But well, it works for looking at powersupply noise in relation to digital signals and similar stuff.

In contrast to that one somehow expects that on a random digital scope functions like measurements work and are reasonably in-cal. And the calibration on digital scopes tends to involve possibly undocumented software, not turning trimmer pots/caps of obvious function while having tongue at a right angle.

> There's something really nice about using analog scopes.

There really is, and it's not just hipster-esque nostalgia like people who haven't used them might think.

For one they're not subject to digital aliasing. Sure, they have some bandwidth limitations that can lead to some of the same results, but I've found they're better at smearing the different frequencies on the screen when I'm looking at the scope with not ideal time steps, whereas it's far easier on a digital scope to get something that looks like your signal but is just an artifact of the digital aliasing. There's a lot of nice features that a DSP pipeline unlocks versus an analog pipeline, but sometimes when things get real wonky it's hard to beat an analog scope to make sense of reality.

I have the DMS edition with the 4.5-digit multimeter, reads down to 10µV and has the GPIB. A damn handy combination of options. A comparable modern Fluke costs $1200. I found this one on a curb.