Has the dust settled on that tool discussion ? Am I allowed to post about TE now, or will anything I say get completely unnoticed / wasted ?
That would be sad because we have great news today in the TE dept....
I had enough a few weeks ago of being called a fool for not getting that 50 Euro ugly yellowed broken old Agilent MSO scope, 54xxxx one thing or another.
No worries, 2 weeks later another one popped up, Agilent again, for a mere 4,000 Euros, yes that's three zeros, and yes still an ugly Agilent one. A week later he lowered the price to only 3,500 Euros, still a tad too much to my taste and wallet !
But this week I saw this ad :
https://www.leboncoin.fr/bricolage/2171536160.htm
Title just says " various oscilloscopes" and the full description/body of the ad just says : " A couple Tek and one HP, in working order ".
Price : " make me an offer ".
Looking at the pic of the HP one, very blurry, could barely make up the model number, looks like " 54645D "... I could see the "Megazoom" badge at the top, and in the bottom right corner the connector for the logic stuff. OK so that must be the one then... and it's a nice good looking HP that I love so much, not the ugly Agilent that I hate so much... and it's not yellowed, and there is life on the CRT, at the least. No broken anything either unlike the Agilent ones a few weeks prior. ALSO it's a 100MHz version whereas the Agilent ones were both 60MHz versions. So I had to act real quick as always, no time to ask questions or pictures or it's game over for you, someone else would have bought it without asking any questions. Always like that. I learned that lesson.
So not knowing anything more about it than what I just exposed, I took a gamble and offered the guy 100 Euros for the HP, thinking 50 Euros would be way too low and I would get outbid. So I thought 3 figure might catch his interest and give me a chance of at least being considered... while 100 Euros is still being reasonable for such a wonderful scope that you have all been selling to me so well, I admit. I didn't even know if the guy was actually willing to sell the HP scope separately of if he wanted to sell the lot, wasn't clear. I was also very unsure whether he would accept to ship, because his ad says no shipping... and 99% of the time when an ad DOES say shipping is available... the seller then says NO it's not ! So an ad that says no shipping up front... yes, I was not holding my breath to say the least !
But... guy accepted my offer and was OK to ship, he sent the scope yesterday, now waiting for delivery in a Frog lab near you !!!
So now I need to find a bunch of knobs to give it its pretty face back. No, no 3DP for me, won't cut it... either OEM knobs or nothing. Can these be found or are they unobtainium ? Scope can still be operated without them I guess, so not too worried. It's just for cosmetics. If you have some HP knobs lying around, a donour HP TE of some kind with the same knobs, I don't know...
So let's see if it will actually be able to display a signal, what errors there are in the self test, what options it might have or not have, RS232, printer output, GPIB, whatever these scopes might have... I have absolutely no idea. I know zero about these scopes, don't know if there is a service manual for them, what are the common problems and hopefully solutions... I know zero.
So the learning curve will be steep...if it needs fixing.
The 54645D is a good score. I'd have jumped on that in a heartbeat, even with signs of g'rilla abuse. The painful part will be finding the probe pods for the LA section; they can be pricey. Aside from that extra LA module inside, it is the very same scope as I have on my bench... I am a wee bit jelly now. Of course I'll help any way I can, brother; I might even convince myself to mail some knobs to frogland...
Probes should be easy... it's a modern scope and the input capacitance is ~13 puff, so it works well even with the Chinesium cheapies right up to approx 50MHz... higher than that and you'll want to get into some better Chinesium probes or even genuine HPAK (Original was HP 10074A 10X probe).
One thing to remember: this is
not a CRO. It is a fully digital oscilloscope that uses a high-resolution CRT monitor because LCDs at the time this was made were simply a inferior display device.
As long as you remember to think about it this way, I have no doubt you'll be able to figure it out.
I've attached the Product Overview (I don't remember where from) as well as the service and programming manuals downloaded direct from HPAK for you.
Good hunting, and welcome to the MegaZoom brotherhood!
mnem