A "Wobuloscope"...
Excursion totale...
Thanks but that's still just as obscure to me !
Only difference is, it's French sounding obscure rather than English sounding obscure !
In a normal year we'd have left for just that, this coming weekend. Two weeks in our beloved Nord (59). Already the second year where we won't. Merde !
Oh boy, in 44 years in this country, you are the very first human being I come across who actually WANTS to go there ! Every body here either refuses to get up there even for a job, and those who are already there because they were born there, dream every night that they will win the lottery and be able escape this land of misery !
The people up there really have nothing on their side, it sucks...
Anyway, could not resist, I powered up the beast then too it apart, pictures below !
This way you an see the period power cord and I also fitted the little hood/visor on the CRT.
I felt brave, I plugged it in and flicked the power switch without even open it up ! That's because it looks in such great nick and the seller did say the scoep was working, which means he did power it up recently and the instrument did not blow up...
The scope appears to work in deed just fine ! clean trace, pretty sharp given the modest ambition of the CRT in such an instrument. Brightness, focus, vertical position, everything works !
Failed to get it display a signal though. So I don't know if the sig gen part of the instrument works or not. Can't hook a scope to it as it uses weird connectors. Not BNC not UHF like. Rather as you can see it looks like the same kind of connector that's used for old TV antenna cables. Horrible, brrr....
Might retrofit BNC connectors for practicality...
To be honest the instrument might well be working just fine and its just me being unable to operate it properly ! I mean it's written in French on the face plate, but I don't understand what the words mean in the context of this instrument !
Plus there are no less than 6 of these HF connectors, and I don't even know which are inputs or outputs, for starters !
Also as you can see the instrument is supplied with a short cable to let you connect to of these HF connectors together... so if one has to wire things up to get it to work, then all hope is lost for me right now !
Need to find a user manual to know how to operate it... then I can see what works and what does not...
After 30 minutes playing with the thing, I felt something weird as my fingers were accidentally rubbing against metal parts of the instruments, like the power switch or the million screws that hold the guts of the instrument in place inside the cabinet. I could swear it was like some kind electrical shock ! This things was trying to ZAP me !!!!
That reminded me of these antique consumer crap cheap radio sets where for some reason they tied the two power leads to teh chassis via caps. Caps of course go south after decades, so you get zapped big time.
I though maybe something something similar was going on, and me "waking up" those caps after decades of sleep, might see them die abruptly within seconds or minutes... ie I could die any moment ! So I pulled the plug and took it apart to see how things were wired in there.
Clearly this is no cheap consumer grade radio... this thing is Tektronix level. Built like a tank, good craftsmanship, well organized/logical layout, tidy wiring with lacing everywhere. They even used two different colours of lacing, yellow and red. All tubes are held in place using an earthquake-proof , spring loaded apparatus. The tubes are going nowhere no matter how much you could abuse this instrument...
So no obvious crappy cap in sight near the power socket, would have been too easy. So no idea where the mains is leaking... maybe the power switch ITSELF ? Would have to take it apart. Need to investigate where the leak is coming from, anyhow. Can't use this thing as is, too dangerous. Thinking of retrofitting it with a modern 3 prong IEC socket and earth this thing. Being at the back it won't be seen, so no visual impact on the originality/authenticity of the instrument, it's preserved, so that's cool. I would of course internally disconnect the original power socket at the front, for safety...
As for it's construction, it's all well organized and tidy as I said. The left part of the instrument is where modulation is handled. It is mechanically separate from the rest of the instrument. You can pull it out of the cabinet. It's connected the rest usin a couple cables which have enough slack and are easily disconnected. No struggle at all. This unit is itself modular : it consists of a main frame and a removable plugins. Big know on the plug-in has two settings / valid positions, and internally we can see it has two identical sections side by side, each including a Quartz and a vaccum tube.
The main frame receiving this plugin, has 3 tubes. so a total of 5 tubes to handle the modulation side of things.
As for the main/core part of the instrument, the center and right most thirds of it... middle third is for the HF generator itself. I removed the shield so you can see what's in it. Not much electronics ! Looks more like mechanical clock work or something... have no idea how it works ! Some old RF magic I presume !
Then the rightmost third of the instrument hots the scope of course, as well as the big ass mains transformer.
Scope section show at least one interesting thing... it's clear that its input is not internally connected to the output of the sig gen. Scope input goes straight to a socket on the front panel. So, that means I must use the provided cable I guess, to externally connect it to the output of the instrument.
But since I don't know how to operate it...
I guess I could just feed this scope input with a signal of mine so that I am in control of things !
this way at least I could tell if the scope actually work or not...that would be a beginning...
So this is it.. quick look and test ride of this thing... now unless someone wants more details / pics, I will button it back up and store it I do'nt know where because frankly, I have completely run out of space...
Yesterday I cleared the back yard and sprayed fluorescent paint on the grass to mark the position of the foundations for the future garage, where to dig the ground with the excavator. Problem, I just found : there is a shortage of truck and excavator drivers, 20,000 missing nation wide, so it's near impossible to find some company to come dig the trenches...