Golborne Vintage Radio

Following on from this thread I thought would be worth talking about scopes we have owned and/or used.
http://golbornevintageradio.co.uk/forum/...0#pid71750

First scope I ever used was probably a tiny Telequipment (Serviscope minor?) at grammar school. We had a few other scopes including a Solartron(?) with an impressive 5MHz(?) BW. Also while I was at school a friend called Ian Loveday had what I think was an ancient Hartley 13A. I lost touch with him in the 1970s and the next I knew was that he was dead:
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/...an-loveday

Also in my teens I borrowed a Heathkit IO18-U that another friend had built. Horrible thing. There's a GZ34 in it so if one turns up it has some value.

First I owned was a Cossor 2000. True dual beam, about 5MHz BW, a ragbag of duff Rs and Cs. But it served me well in my late teens.

In my gap year at BBC Research labs I got used to nice scopes. Our standard instrument was a 50MHz HP with plugins. Going to uni was a comedown as the scopes were horrible by comparison.

I owned a big Marconi by then, can't remember the model, possibly 2000 or 2200. Their (failed) attempt to rival the Tek 545. It had interesting slide back measurement facilities. I debugged my Wireless World teletext decoder with that scope.

Then a Tek 585. The all out "sacrifice everything to speed"  85MHz job. Was meant to be 100MHz but Tek could never quite guarantee it. Mine was not the best of specimens. ISTR I bought it at a secondhand testgear sale at a place in the railway arches by Euston.

By then I was working for Michael Cox Electronics. We had Solartron OS3000 and Telequipment D83 (the big screen version of the D75). Both about 40-50MHz. I preferred the Solartrons and the manufacturer's rep sold me an ex-demo unit. This was my a faithful scope for a few years until the EHT blew up.

I'd started my own business in 1986 and soon realised that the OS3000 was running out of capability. So in 1988(?) I splashed out £2000 on a secondhand Tek 2465 from one of the testgear rental companies. What a revelation! 300MHz, cursors and everything working spot on. I still have it though it has some awkward intermittents.

The 2465 was replaced by a 2465B (400MHz and a few extra tricks) which is still my main scope. I think I paid £800 from Stewart of Reading. You'd have to prise that scope out my cold, dead hands

Also in the fleet are a Tek 2445A (l150MHz version of 2465), another Tek portable 100MHz (2245?). A grand old Tek 547 that just sits under my bench gathering dust. It used to be the scope I acquired for the Vintage Wireless Museum for mending standards converters. I don't really want it but it's too good to get rid of. It's also full of 6DJ8 (ECC88) that are worth a fair bit. A Tek digital TDS210 bought new. Only 60MHz and pretty crude but it was great for slowly repeating and one shot signals. A Tek 5110 low speed mainframe with high gain plugins. Occasionally useful when I want to look at microvolts. Newest is a Rigol 1054Z digital bought new for under £300. Hugely capable little box of tricks though I still prefer to use my 2465B.

Used a fair few but not actually owned much, at the moment I have Tenma which is a rebadged GW Instek GOS-630FC, one of the last of the CRT analog scopes, prior to that I had a Philips can't remember the model but round CRT possibly dual beam, prior to that a long long time ago was a homebrew lashup...3BP1, EF50's etc....2 MHz on a good day.

EDIT: Just sussed the Philips I had....PM3230, a basic 10MHz dual beam job.

Lawrence.

Hi.
I've had a lot of scopes too.
The first was a little valve one with a tiny screen of a bout two or three inches, the trace would just manage half of it and worked on one range only, it certainly was amusing though.
Then I got an old Telequpment valve scope from British Relay and the gaffer had a laugh and said "you're keen, I cant remember what the model was but all that was wrong with it was the CRT having an open circuit heater, managed to weld the heaters with AC from a tellies line stage!! Had it for a few years. Then gave up a bit of hobby work with growing up kids and working with Sony in Glasgow and a daily commute.
Got back into all this when self employed and had a couple of Hitachi V-212's and the Tek scope that needs work.
I did always hanker for the Tek with the line selector, (405,525,625 & 819). Used them at British Relay in the 70's while training as a station engineer on the Relay system which was the best job in the trade I have had, Sony second!!!

Apart from rubbish messing about with an HS2 display as a teenager my first scope was a Cossor 339 (which I still have). As an apprentice with Ferranti I learnt to use the things on a little Telequipment. Then as a student and as an HP employee I used HP180 series (50Mhz probably the same as Jeffrey) but really liked the sampling plug-ins both 500MHz and 1GHz when designing 140MHz digital circuitry. For general purpose work it was later to be the HP1725A (275MHz) a rather tired example of which I still own. Latterly in my HP/Agilent career I enjoyed using the delightful little HP54610 500MHz digital scopes although I did get caught out occasionally with aliasing.

My own trusty HP1725A now suffers from a rather dim CRT so I often find it easier to use a little Kikusui 40MHz scope that I bought at an autojumble for £7.

Peter

Whoops, that reminds me, should have added to my previous post the little Cossor 1039 which I once owned.

I started out with a Hartley 13A. A whole bunch of these was released from the MOD in about 1970, and I bought mine age 16 in 1972. Huge, heavy, truly lousy performance. Must have sold it at some point.

Next one was around 1977, a Solartron CD1400 with a bunch of different plugins for it. That was next to nothing when Southampton University obsoleted it. Sold it about 10 years ago when I started with a Tektronix obsession. I have more scopes and plugins that I am almost embarrassed to list them. It is a long list....

Does anyone here OWN a Tek 519: http://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/519
This was an almost legendary 1GHz real time scope which didn't have a vertical amplifier.

I think one member here has USED them but I don't want to name him as it may be embarrassing. If I say that a big market(main market? almost only market?) for these scopes was atomic research you will understand why.

It was a truly crazy cold war machine. 2x6 cm display with a spot diameter of 0.1mm, 1GHz bandwidth that needed 10V to give full deflection, and 2ns per cm sweep speed that needed a massive air cooled RF beam tetrode 4CX250F to generate.

It used pseudo-GR874 connectors, gold plated with 125 ohms characteristic impedance, and hence a whole drawer full of accessories to make it all work.

It pulled 650W out of the mains to do all this.

Quirky, rare and actually quite useless as a bench measurement tool. Oh - I don't have one.

Another Tek 2465/A/B fan here. Used to also have a Tek 7904A with loads of plugins.

I loved the 7904s - I was sponsored through university by STL in Harlow and had to work there for a couple of summers - always had Tek 7000-series scopes on my bench and got to love them.

I'm with Jeffrey on the 2465s though...

My first scope was a Russian C15 bought new in the mid 1970s.
I had a Scopex 4D10 for a while and then a Telequipment D31 with an intermittent Y amp fault that could never be fixed with anything but a bash even after at least half a reel of solder.
I then managed to acquire a faulty Tektronix 7603 with three faulty plug ins and loads of twiddler scratches.
It took be a whole two weeks to fix it. It could do with a better tube but it is fine for now.