That said, anything with a floppy drive scares me because it undeniably indicates how old it is. My SDS7102V is no Tektronix, but an honest 1 GS/sec and at the time, under $200 on eBay.
Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
My 54825A had a power-up problem: if you unplugged the AC cord for a few hours, pressing the front-panel button wouldn't power on the scope. But if you plugged in the AC for about 5 minutes, it would work fine again. That sounds like an easy thing to fix, but the whole power-on architecture was a baffling Rube Goldberg device from the button on a small support PCB to the front panel PCB to the PC plug-in card to the…
There are exceptions to the "Winscopes" from the same era in the 1 GHz+ space (RTOS like VxWorks but with Ethernet and modern goodies) that are not HP/Tek/R&S, but I'm not listing them because I'm out on an active hunt for one ;-)
That doesn't leave a whole lot of alternatives, Mr Lecroy.
Re: Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
#33A bit ago a semi-retired guy came back to help with some stuff including debugging serial ports. It was very cool to see him fiddle with the knobs and be like "oh those squiggles look good" "no that doesn't look right" etc. https://i.imgur.com/R5aEXbq.jpeg Meanwhile total mystery to everyone else how to operate/interpret the machine but a lot of fun
One totally needs a 500 MHz oscilloscope to debug a kHz range serial port signal! :-)
Re: Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
#34Flebay has some used ones around $1.5k. I wonder how much this model MSRP brand new? Either way, $300 is a steal!
I think they sold for $60k back in the early 2000s.
Re: Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
#35Re: Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
#36Flebay has some used ones around $1.5k. I wonder how much this model MSRP brand new? Either way, $300 is a steal!
I think they sold for $60k back in the early 2000s.
This is one of the cases where it might be better to lease it.
Re: Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
#37$50 bucks would be a lot for that amount of work.
Re: Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are exceptions to the "Winscopes" from the same era in the 1 GHz+ space (RTOS like VxWorks but with Ethernet and modern goodies) that are not HP/Tek/R&S, but I'm not listing them because I'm out on an active hunt for one ;-)
> not HP/Tek/R&S That doesn't leave a whole lot of alternatives, Mr Lecroy.
Re: Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
#39Re: Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
#40Yeah 1 GHz is nice, but that tiny 200 MHz Siglent is going to be much more useful in practice for most things. Speaking of boat anchors, I'm trying to get my company to buy a DSA91304a (13 GHz scope with SERDES debugging). ~$44K with all the options, but still Windows-XP. The Windows-7 ones unfortunately don't have the options I want. Maybe there is a hack..
You just can’t characterise power rail noise well with less than 500MHz of bandwidth.