Golborne Vintage Radio

I have just acquired this HP 5246L frequency  counter circa 1953, its built like a tank/battleship and its completely  dead. No life at all.
does any one know any thing about this type of test equipment? Note to self I must stop buying old test equipment that doesn,t work. I also need to find schematics, circuit diagrams. I can find the operating manual and hand book but no schematics. There is a good chance
I can fix it without the schematics but its always better to have them as when its fixed it will need calibrating. Its all discreet construction
dozens of transistors on daughter pcbs plugged into a mother board. beautiful engineering quality heavy cast alloy chassis.This was 
built when they knew how to make things to last. Its just that my one doesn,t work. After admiring it and stroking it. I now have to coax a 70 year old piece electronic kit back into life. I think the fault is more fundamental. we start at the mains in and work forward from there. As long as the mains transformer is ok we stand a chance. I think the  psu may have had a catastrophic failure. Its so dead its not true I am beginning to think i my have bought a big heavy
box full of leaky capacitors  IF anyone can help i would be grateful.

this is my first post, you can probably tell . please ignore bad spelling and grammar

regards    tygger2

I don't know how similar it is but I have found this link to the HP 5245L : HP 5245L

There is a link on thiis page to it's manual.

Tracy

Hi Tygger2 and welcome to GVR.

While vintage HP testgear isn't my field I'd say it was 1960s, not 1950s. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usDpuNZMcpk
Since it looks similar to the '45L there's a chance of some commonality. It will become obvious once you have the covers off.

Some notes on both instruments here, including noting some differences: https://www.antiqueradios.com/forums/vie...8&t=214192

I went through a phase of buying non working test gear with varying results, it's not for the faint hearted. I've a HP SA that weighs a ton that I've been working on, on and off for years.

Apart from check the power supply I can't really help. Being completely dead might be a good thing, a simple blown fuse, resistor or diode burnt out type of thing. Your going to need a schematic though, Telford show as having the operators and service manual,see this page - http://www.telford-electronics.co.uk/manual.php?alpha=h give em a ring.

Andy.

You are in luck. I have a spare copy of the full service manual, original, dated May 1967. With all circuits on those double A3 which are so difficult to copy.
If you want it on a CD, then it will have to wait for me to scan it. If you would like the original, then may I suggest £15 including postage. It is over 1/2" thick and to Royal Mail, counts as a small parcel. The transistors use HP numbers, so I'll include a list of possible commercial equivalents.
I will need your full name and postal address. I am not sure if there is a private message system here for my email and Paypal addresses. I will check.
Billn m0wpn

Yep. It's late 1960s... Most importantly, it has.... NIXIES!!

To be fair, an awful lot of lab gear from the 60s and 70s had nixies and/or dekatrons.

If you need spare nixies, let me know - I have a very large number of different types plus various HP driver modules (some of which are very cunning in how they decode & drive the nixies)...