GOOD TEA day for me !!!!
A friend surprised me and paid a quick visit to give me some electronic stuff he salvaged from work. He works for "Orange" , ex "France Telecom", the main phone operator in Frog land. He is out all day in the field maintaining the phone and Internet infrastructrure. Every time he tosses some defective and/or obsolete piece of gear, he brings it to me instead of tossing it in the trash as they normally do !
So today he brought a phone line test set, very orange as you can see, to test analog lines. Very rugged and very much water proof. Quick tear down pics.
Also a couple very big boards, don't know what they do.... very heavy, measured the PCB thickness with the calipers, at 2.5mm !
Both boards have roughly the same topology. 2/3 of the space is occupied by what looks like a bunch of I/O stuff. Then last third is the main CPU coordinating all that. Lots of big BGA chips, ALCATEL, BROADCOM mostly.
Power supply is a third party daughter board as you can see. On one of the boards the PSU released the magic smoke it seems !
Then the pièce de résistance.... a new scope !!!
But something really special ! Not just yet another 2000 series Tek, or yet another hollow state 500 series Tek... no... still a Tek, but something very special !
A 11000 series scope !
I know, sub sampling scope, useless blah blah blah... don't care, always wanted one in my "collection" ! They are so different from all the other scopes, so weird in their UI, so advanced for their time... so cool looking... looked like a million dollar scope. Also very rare on the used market today ! Last one I saw in the local / French ad site was 18 months ago ! Contacted the seller within an hour but of course it was already sold...
So, 18 months later, another one shows up ! Was complete with all 3 plugins, in good cosmetic nick, and seller even pretended it was working just fine on all channels (even though "of course", as always, the pic he showed was of the scope powered off...). Said he used it for 4 years and developed a few boards with it, said "it's big and old but works fine so great for beginners with not much money to put in their first scope".....For sale at 90 Euros ! For a working one complete and in good nick ?!
Lucky for me, it was for local pick-up only.... so would deter many. I therefore had much less "competition"... obviously the guy was hardly local to me, half way across the country, in Paris !
But he was in the west of Paris and I knew several people in that area, from the Renault Safrane forum I frequent. One of them went to pick the scope up... when the seller wanted to demonstrate to him that it works.... bloody scope did NOT power up, even though he checked it just a few days before, typical !
Seller was apparently very embarrassed and said to my friend TAKE IT, it's free, sorry for the trouble, I apologize !
COOL, a free 11K in perfect nick, and some troubleshooting fun ahead to get to know it intimately, what more could I ask for ?!
But still, it was in Paris... not going to drive there, way too long of a trip, my right leg hurts real bad after only 45 minutes of driving, having to "regulate" the gas pedal / speed. Need cruise control... hear it can be retrofitted, my model year is half wired for that. It's not too much of a job to retrofit apparently.
Anyway.... then another member also near Paris, from that same forum had planned to come in my area for his summer vacation, and offered to bring the scope to my door step for free. So, 6 weeks after buying the scope, today it got delivered !
First attempt : scope powers up, fan spins, LEDs on the front panel light up and dance as you would expect but.... nothing on the CRT display ! Not a sausage...
Turned it off, left it alone for a few hours.. powered it up again... and this time it starts up just fine, I do have a display this time, I can see the self test being performed, and it passes with flying colours, not a single error ! Played with the thing for a few hours and it all just seem to work just fine, as the seller said !!!
Display might be very slightly dim, if I am being picky, but other than that...
I do notice though that the probe calibrator output does not appear to work. I get no signal out of it, just a +300mV DC level. So that's great, some trouble shooting for me, on something simple that's totally harmless ! Of course I assume there are no schematics for this thing.... though maybe there is, seeing as it hit the market in 1986 and was obsoleted soon after that, in 1989. At that time the service manuals in general were still comprehensive.
Also noticed that the "power" LED indicator near the main switch, does not work. Maybe it's not an LED, maybe it's a small incandescent bulb in there, will have to check for that.
Anyway !
Some technical details :
- It's a 11401 main frame, good for 500MHz, sampling at a whooping 20MS/s
- Plugin #1 : 11A32 = Vertical Amp, two channels, 400MHz. In a 500MHz mainframe I guess that will give an effective BW of what ? 350 or something ?
- Plugin #2 : 11A32 also. So a total of 4 channels.
- Plugin #3 : 11T5H = adds video trigger capabilities.
Fan is surprisingly quiet ! It's totally bearable in the long run. I was expecting MUCH worse than that to be honest !
Has RS232, GPIB and a Centronics printer port at the back.
Has of course the touch screen !
It works just fine, and it's COVID APPROVED !
You do NOT have to touch the screen surface to activate / operate it ! You only have to bring your finger close to the screen, like 5+ mm above the surface, and it will register ! It uses the same principle as the old HP touch screen computer from the '70's IIRC : an array / matrix of IR detectors that make a coarse "grid" of small rectangles about 15x10mm I would say. Something like that. The size of the tip of your pinky, say. In practice it works just fine.
It's HUGE, and HEAVY !!! Even my 500 series hollow state Teks fear this 11000 scope ! They would not want to be engaged in a fight with it !
It's deeper than a 500, does not fit on the bench as you can see. It's much wider than a 500 too !
The user interface is so out of this world that I really do need to read the manual to operate this thing and test it properly. It's so exotic and weird... I LOVE THIS THING!!!
I love that video Trigger plugin too ! Has a cool 4 digit full dot matrix display, next to a little rotary encoder with a very, very firm detent, makes a big CLICK CLICK CLICK, super cool. When I fiddle with it and I watch the display next to it showing various information, it looks very much like I am fiddling with the auto-pilot controls on a modern aircraft, love it !
Oh boy I can't believe I managed to grab one of these scopes, fully working, in tip top shape, with all its plugins... for free, not even shipping, delivered to my door literally !
A very nice and special addition to my Tek "collection" for sure !!
Hell might use it when I can ... for repetitive signals should be fine. From what I understand, it was mostly designed as a special purpose scope to help in digital circuit design, to help check and characterize with great accuracy the edges of fast digital signals. Very accurate time base, 10 bit resolution, fancy math capabilities... it's limited in what it can do, but it does it very well. Well that's my understanding of this beast so far !
Did I mention that I love it to bits, that I am super excited ?!
2H30 AM... attaching a few pics and off to bed !