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I recently did something similar with a TDS7154B. Rather than going with an IDE/PATA drive I was able to use the SATA Gen1 ports on the motherboard and a molex-sata power adapter to use a modern SSD.
Give it a month and the acquisition ASICs will blow up and the caps will eat through the board traces. Can’t stand these scopes.
For a brief second, I thought this was about an original 7104. Are there specific TDS models that you have found to be better, btw, reliability-wise?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah agreed. I’ve fixed more Tek equipment than most people out there. In the order of hundreds of units. These are just exceptionally bad.
i thought maybe it was just something regionally here or the way people stored em, but i was in a position to refab many a few years ago and totally agree. tek had 100% repart rate and seemed like anything else (brand wise) was always in better condition internally even when way older.
Love this. I knew nothing about oscilloscopes until just a few months ago, when reasearched and bought one from a science lab. It wasfor a personal side project. I gutted it out and installed a mini PC inside, and now i run AI models into it. It's like my personal AI assistance. Hooked up to OpenAI realtime voice, grok bot, claude code, etc so I can command it to do stuff even when my main computer is off. I just mai…
I was initially confused how you managed to get amber and green screen together, but I guess you put an LCD in ..
Yeah 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..
As I wrote: the TDS7104 is now sitting on a shelf in the garage, next to an Agilent 54831 and some other boat anchors. My daily drivers are a Siglent scope and a puny TDS220, which is about to be replaced by a TDS3052 that I'm bringing back to life. Hobbyists rarely need more than 100 MHz BW. I hope you're able to thoroughly test that DSA91304a before dropping $44k on it!
Cute little thing. The reality is you hope that's all you need.
Give it a month and the acquisition ASICs will blow up and the caps will eat through the board traces. Can’t stand these scopes.
Nice, so I'll get even more entertainment out of it! The equipment that's bought and sold at the electronics flea market typically isn't used as a means to an end, it is the end. There's disappointment when you buy something there and it just works. There's no fun in that. I don't really have a use for a R&S AMIQ, but replacing all the PC motherboard caps taught me a lot about good desoldering practices. https://tomv…