Repair options for a Keysight 34972A DMM/Scanner????.......

[Smokey]

So I have a Agilent/Keysignt 34972A DMM/Scanner that just died.  When I push the power button I hear the fan come on but that's it.  No life on the display.

I contacted Keysight and their official repair service appears to be a "swap" where they give me a completely different refurbished unit, all at the low low cost of $876 USD, or in other words 43% of the cost of a new unit (at $2013 USD)!!

WTF? 

So I lose my calibration history, and I get to spend half the price of a new unit when all that could be wrong is a broken display?

This is a piece of production equipment, so I'm not really allowed to take it apart and play with it myself.  Is that swap option really the only official repair path from Keysight?

[TheSteve]

That appears to be the only option Keysight offers on that unit. Shame you don't have a repair agreement, its yearly fee isn't too bad.

So I'd open it up and have a peek if at all possible.

[Smokey]

As it turns out, I hooked the unit up to the network and..... it's alive!  Still communicates and still takes accurate measurements. 
It looks like it's just the display that died.

What's the best way to get a new vfd display to see if that's all that's going on?

[HighVoltage]

Did you ever found out what the problem was?

[Smokey]

Not really.  This is certainly a case of "it's sorta working so don't touch it".  The thing is happily cranking out measurements over the network, and it's in a place where no one could see the display anyway, so I'm just letting it do it's thing.  I did check the cal and it's just as accurate over all the ranges as when the display was working. 
Funny thing is Keysight could totally make some money repairing the display if they would just have that option.  Some accountant probably ran the numbers and saw that they would make just as much money totally ignoring all their customers with minor repair problems.  That sucks hard for service, but I get it.

[HighVoltage]

I just bought a 34972A with the same problem and hope I can get it repaired.
Thanks for your feedback may be we can figure out what the problem is.

[nfmax]

Is the display just turned off? Check with the SCPI command  DISPlay? and turn on with DISPlay ON

[Smokey]

That would be too funny.  I'm going to have to try that SCPI command now.  I can just imagine the Keysight tech guy working on the unit if I had spent $800 to get it repaired and that was all that was wrong.  You know there's no way in hell they would tell you what the actual problem was then. 

To be honest the front panel interface for this piece of equipment isn't very useful when it's working anyway.  It's really meant to be a piece of an automated test setup and not a daily driver.