List your test equipment "scores" here!

[felixd]

RACAL-DANA 9514 (9500 series) Universal Time/100MHz Frequency Counter with options:

• Option 70 - Analog Trigger Output
• Option 22A - Oven oscillator replaces the standard oscillator and provides an aging rate of less than 3x10^-9 per day.

Option 22A

Aging Rate: < 3x10^-9/day*
Temperature Stability: < 3x10^-9/^oC 0^oC to +50^oC
Voltage stability: < 2x10^-8 with 10% line V variation

*After 3 months continous operation

Option 70 - Analog Trigger Output

1.4.7.1 This option provides a DC voltage available at the rear panel which corresponds to the triggering level of the input. It has a range of - 3.2 V to + 3.2 V. It will mirror either the analog setting, or DAC setting (on 9512,9514, or 9515 only) depending on which type of trigger level selection is in control. The output trigger level is independent of the input attenuators, for example, if the trigger level output reads 1.5 V and the X100 attenuator is in use, the internal trigger level is (1.5 x 100) V or 150 V.

Last calibrated: 11/10/2012 (EDIT: Last calibrated: 30th January 2022  It was only 40 ppb (0,4 Hz) away from 10MHz , 40 ppb !!! )

Price: 75 USD

The only problem I have with it is laud fan. Looking for nice replacement. (EDIT: Fan has been sucessfuly replaced year after I bought it)

Photos:
https://goo.gl/photos/yzzR7qbjXwqGe76q7

[eas]

At ~$300 shipped, the physically damaged Datron 1081 7.5 Digit DMM I received about a week ago probably is less a score to be admired than an object lesson in the dangers of volt-nuttery, but its still pretty cool. I'm still puzzling over why I felt pretty good passing up a few chances to get a working Keithley 2001 for ~$500 while diving headlong into buying this thing.



Maybe it's the 2cm high digits on the neon VFD display? Or the repair-friendly through-hole construction?



In any case, it seems to be working pretty well on DCV, within the limits of the meters and references I have for comparison. I need to make up some new kelvin leads to check the resistance function. Not sure what to do about ACV. There have been a few issues which may be user error, software bugs, or as yet undiagnosed hardware issues.

More details and lots of Datron 1081 teardown photos on my blog.

[Vgkid]

So you bought it...
 

[eas]

Did I end up taking a bullet that was headed your way, Vgkid?

[Vgkid]

yep, I was going to put in a bid for 200 as well.

[bitseeker]

Maybe it's the 2cm high digits on the neon VFD display? Or the repair-friendly through-hole construction?

Yup, definitely the digits. Big, sharp, and a warm amber. What more could you ask for in a numeric readout?

[guido]

Reliability..? These Panaplex displays do fail and are very hard to find (at least on this side of the pond).

[bitseeker]

Good point, guido. There's always a tradeoff of some sort.

[PTR_1275]

I bought a tti TGA1230 arbitrary waveform generator the other week and it arrived the other day. It has found it's place on my bench already. It's in really good condition, I'll get some photos up in the next few days.

It had been on eBay for about 6 months for $200 usd, I offered them $100usd and they countered me to $125usd. It ended up costing me less than $300 australian shipped.

[TheSteve]

Bought a broken Agilent 34450A multimeter off of ebay for 150 dollars. It had something loose inside according to the listing. Turned out there is a service note regarding this meter - the metal shields have been known to fall off or come loose on some units. The unit was still under warranty so I sent it in and received a brand new Keysight branded 34450A this morning. It was calibrated yesterday. Another great additional to the bench and the reason why I will continue to purchase mainly HP/Agilent/Keysight products - they are so well supported and generally have been for the history of the company.

[bitseeker]

That's amazing! Congrats!

[HighVoltage]

Bought a broken Agilent 34450A multimeter off of ebay for 150 dollars. It had something loose inside according to the listing. Turned out there is a service note regarding this meter - the metal shields have been known to fall off or come loose on some units. The unit was still under warranty so I sent it in and received a brand new Keysight branded 34450A this morning. It was calibrated yesterday. Another great additional to the bench and the reason why I will continue to purchase mainly HP/Agilent/Keysight products - they are so well supported and generally have been for the history of the company.

What a great deal.
I totally agree with you on HP/Agilent/Keysight products.
I have the same experience.
Even if you are not the original owner, if your instrument is under warranty, they will take care of you.

[guido]

Don't get me wrong, i love those displays. Got these two just because of the looks.



The displays have much better looks than this photo. LED, nixie or VFD don't even get close. 

As meters they are ok. Replaced leaking caps and did a quick "calibration" agains my reference. But i'm not using them much for measurements. The auto ranging is sloooooow. And i had to replace a display on one of them. Took me two tries to buy a piece of second hand equipement to get a good one. Think very old industry panel meters (e.g. analog devices).

[TheSteve]

The displays do look nice. I think OLED is even better for contrast and such but I fear for the overall lifetime of the display. I don't think the display on my 34450A will last 20 or 30 years, never mind 40 or 50.

[crispy_tofu]

The displays do look nice.

+1, I could look at that all day 

[JoeB83]

Bought a broken Agilent 34450A multimeter off of ebay for 150 dollars. It had something loose inside according to the listing. Turned out there is a service note regarding this meter - the metal shields have been known to fall off or come loose on some units. The unit was still under warranty so I sent it in and received a brand new Keysight branded 34450A this morning. It was calibrated yesterday. Another great additional to the bench and the reason why I will continue to purchase mainly HP/Agilent/Keysight products - they are so well supported and generally have been for the history of the company.

WOW. That's a really good deal.

[TheSteve]

I've been hitting ebay hard lately, wife is about to kill me. This should be the last goodie for a while.

Made a low ball offer on an HP 53132A universal counter with option 010. The ad had the first picture of the counter upside down and it wasn't powered on in any of the pictures. The seller did state it was power on tested only - so it was a bit of a gamble. The listed price was $814.99. I offered $400 - they countered rather quickly at $600. So I countered at $425 shipped and said I didn't know if it really worked or how bright/dim the display was as it is an older HP branded unit and that was the most I could offer - 5 minutes later the seller accepted!
Received it today and it was actually very clean overall. The display is also very bright, it can't have been powered on too many hours. I verified it worked perfect and was super pleased at this point. Then I figured I would update the firmware. Well this is a rather dumb move if you don't save the calibration values before hand, and of course I didn't. The firmware is held in 4 29F010 PLCC 32 flash chips and is probably not really intended to be user upgraded. I had found newer firmware for download on the internet. I am a sucker for newer firmware, always have been, bricked a few devices because of it over the years. It seems I still haven't learned my lesson. It powered up with an EEPROM error, then the next power up it seemed fine. However every power up after that it now said it was "UNCALIBRATED" - opps!   Now thankfully the story has a happy ending as I have happen to have the gear needed for a basic calibration(it doesn't need much) and it is working great again. Whew - so lesson learned I suppose.

I troll ebay quite often throughout the work day and most evenings, mainly for HP/Agilent/Keysight gear. I've seen tons of buy it now items that are smoking great deals. Often it isn't gear I need though or already have etc. I think maybe another thread should be started with hot deals, when someone sees a great deal and they aren't buying it themselves a link could be posted. I know I'd rather see someone from the EEVBLOG get a great deal vs a random person.
One last thought - I really feel for anyone not in the US trying to get the insanely good deals. I am in Canada but have a US shipping address and it is only a few minutes to cross the border to pickup packages. I can bid on most US based auctions but not all so I still feel pretty lucky.

[HighVoltage]

Congratulations to a great counter!

One last thought - I really feel for anyone not in the US trying to get the insanely good deals.

Well, that is not entirely true.
Although, I must say that the quantity of Agilent / Keysight items on ebay USA is much larger than anywhere else, but the prices are lower in Europe and sometimes I have gotten deals on ebay Germany or ebay France or ebay Italy that I can not even believe myself.

I just got an Agilent 34901A 20-Channel-Multiplexer Modul for less than 5 Euros.
And it is in perfect - like new - condition.

The great deals are out there, we just have to keep looking.

[Joule Thief]

this Keithley 192 cleaned up nicely

I have also been having good success with lowball eBay bids.

The 192 and the 175 above it were purchased for $38 + $18 USD.

After removing sticker residue and case cleaning, the 192 required retigthening of the mains transformer mounting studs and the 175 needed the REL pushbutton switch cleaned.

Both have spot on calibrations with cal stickers from 2008 and 2012.

[TheSteve]

Congratulations to a great counter!

One last thought - I really feel for anyone not in the US trying to get the insanely good deals.

Well, that is not entirely true.
Although, I must say that the quantity of Agilent / Keysight items on ebay USA is much larger than anywhere else, but the prices are lower in Europe and sometimes I have gotten deals on ebay Germany or ebay France or ebay Italy that I can not even believe myself.

I just got an Agilent 34901A 20-Channel-Multiplexer Modul for less than 5 Euros.
And it is in perfect - like new - condition.

The great deals are out there, we just have to keep looking.

That is true. I found a seller on ebay.ca that never seems to sell anything and at times he heavily discounts items. Turns out all items are only able to be seen from ebay.ca, so his viewing audience is quite small.

[mzacharias]

Recent score: Brand new in box Fluke 28 series II for $200.00 freight included.

 

[tmbinc]

I need to clean up my equipment and make better photos. Sorry. Most of the stuff is from the broadcom auctions, but the HP 34401A was from ebay.

But nevertheless:

• HP 34401A; couldn't resist in finally buying one. (300 EUR)
• Teledyne LeCroy Summit T24 (with all options except BitTracer enabled)- PCIe analyzer (without probes unfortunately; I need to build one.) (~$600 together with the next two items)
• Unigraf DPA-400, DPR-100: DisplayPort reference sink and Aux analyzer. Got this in a lot with the Summit.
• Corelis CAS-1000 I2C logger; same as the Unigrafs, I don't really need it (though it could be handy)
• Teledyne LeCroy Z3-16 PCIe Exerciser (~$300)
• Anritsu MD8480C, with 4x BTS (HSPA), 1x GSM, Voice Codec; all software options enabled (~$150, but it's large to ship.)

Got a bunch of other stuff as well from the auctions, but this is the most useful stuff. I'm particularly happy about the PCIe tools; they were pretty awesome bargains, and hard to obtain used. They are also very new (2013/2014). The Z3-16 is still the top-of-the-line exerciser, and the T24 is their lowcost analyzer (which does everything I need - 4x Gen2). I need to build a iPass PCIe probe, either passive or active. For the Z3-16 I also need to build a host emulator setup - I hope I can just wire together two PCIe slots.

The MD8480C is nice because it allows me to connect any GSM/WCDMA equipment to a local network. For GSM compliance testing (which I was trying to do with OsmocomBB), the CRTU-RU is much better (since it comes with the 3GPP test case implementations), but for a simple "let's see how this wireless device talks to the network", the Anritsu is nice. Unfortunately I only have the very basic software for it (i.e. no test cases, no network-in-a-box), but since it's all delivered in source form, it's "just a matter of writing some code".

[AF6LJ]

Nice.

[bitseeker]

Scored a Uni-T UT210E mini clamp meter for about $28 shipped during AliExpress 11.11 sale (kind of like a Black Friday sale). The seller drop shipped from a US warehouse, so it arrived in just a few days. Bonus!

It's a nice little meter for use around the house.

[bitseeker]

The 192 and the 175 above it were purchased for $38 + $18 USD.

Wow! Really nice scores there.