Sorting stuff is going not too bad, lab should be operationnal in a couple weeks maybe... managed to clear a bit of space on the bench, so I thought hey, let's treat myself with a bit of early lab fun, to keep me motivated...
While sorting through lots of really ancient stuff my old friend gave me... I excavated this thing. A 1MHz crystal oscillator... a chunky one as you can see. Including its mounting base, it's 15cm high. Base is 65x65mm. Oscillator "can" itself is 10cm high, 50x50mm cross section.
No date on it, but looking really old eh... not sure it would fit in these modern smartphone gizmos...
Has a vacuum tube-like 8 pin connector, and inside the base, an old Allen-Bradley carbon composition resistor.
There is a nice multi-turn Bourns trimmer in the base, to let you finely adjust the frequency.
The plaque on it gives no date. Says it's made by " Vectron Laboratories, Inc, Norwalk, Connecticut ". Sounds serious !
Model :
204-1526Serial Number :
41764 so quite a popular unit I guess...
Google is not very talkative on that one... needless to say it didn't find me a datasheet, spec, or wiring for it...
It barely managed to show me a few pics of more modern Vectron oscillators, and that Microchip apparently acquired Vectron at some point.
So I guess it must have been a well known / valuable brand back in the day.
Couldn't resist the temptation of playing with it... would it still work after 50+ years ??
There are only 3 wires coming out of it... black red and a coax cable... sounds simple enough.
So I scoped the signal from the coax cable while ramping up the supply voltage slowly... 1 Volt.... 2volts.... 3 volts... 4 volts....5 Volts.... still no output whatsoever at 5V meh.... maybe it's broken
But it's old so maybe it needs more than 5V... but how much ?! Well seeing that I had nothing to lose really, I just kept increasing the voltage slowly hoping at some point it would come to life...
At about 8.5V all a of sudden I get a signal !!!
A nice clean stable sine wave, bang on 1MHz according to the scope cursors, looking good !!
This bastard is still alive !!
At this voltage, it draws 70mA and the sine wave measures about 1 Vpp.
Then I noticed that if I kept increasing the supply voltage... amplitude of the signal would increase as well ! Eh ?!
So how do I know where to stop not to fry it ?!
I slowly kept increasing the voltage.... until I got to about 23Volts, because I noticed that at this point, suddenly the amplitude of the sine wave stabilizes. No clipping or any bad effect that I can see on the scope... no it's just that the amplitude found its plateau. So I stopped there. At that point, device draws 210mA and the amplitude of the sine wave is nearly 5Vpp.
That's close to 5 Watts, quite a lot, so assume there must be some heating going on, maybe some temperature regulation as well, I don't know.
Since it looked bang on 1.00MHz on the scope, and stable, I went further and measured it more accurately on my old Metrix Nixie counter. Obviously it was cold, the Vectron was barely warm, and it's just a not so accurate counter trying to measure an oscillator of completely unknown specs.... so it's fair to say it was not exactly 5 star science ! But I don't care, it's for fun eh, gimme a break, wanted to see what the counter would say anyway, and how the measurements would evolve over the course of a few minutes.
Just after power up, dead cold, the counter measured 1,000,016 Hz , going down slowly and at a constant rate. After a few minutes it reached spot on 1,000,000 Hz so obviously I had to take a picture !
Then a few seconds later it got to 999,999 Hz at which point I totally lost interest !
Now that I know it works, I just can't get myself to throw it away.. so I will keep it.
Plus hey, if the temperature is regulated, who knows, given its large size maybe it's super stable and accurate and it might well be my best time base in the lab !
So one more reason for keeping it...
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OK done for the fun... now back to sorting stuff....