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Tektronix TDS 1012 - TPOS 1012 ?

E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
I had the misfortune today to have to use a TDS 1012 !

For the sake of my sanity I won't go into the exactly gory details but amongst
my irritation with it was the way I simply couln't get tit to display anything
remotely like a usable trace. I was just looking for some lowish level audio
band noise btw (actually line frequency hum).

In the end I was able to press into service an ancient Telequipment D67
http://www.shopingathome.com/Telequipment_D67.jpg

which finally gave me a trace I could do something useful with.

My primary probem in attempting to view the noise I was looking for was that the
Tek was triggering on and displaying vast quantites (~1.5V) of ~ 48kHz.

I eventually discovered that simply turning on the TPOS (total piece of shit)
1012 swamped the trace on the Telequipment too !

Ye Gods ! What one earth possesed them to make such a time wasting, RFI
radiating godawful pile of crap ?

Graham

p.s. don't even get me started on trying to use Ch1 and Ch2 in difference mode
either. Also please don't mention 'menus' ! Sheesh ! Now if I'd had my 465
there........
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Eeyore said:
I had the misfortune today to have to use a TDS 1012 !

For the sake of my sanity I won't go into the exactly gory details but amongst
my irritation with it was the way I simply couln't get tit to display anything
remotely like a usable trace. I was just looking for some lowish level audio
band noise btw (actually line frequency hum).

In the end I was able to press into service an ancient Telequipment D67
http://www.shopingathome.com/Telequipment_D67.jpg

Ah, yes! Got a Telequipment D66 here but the input attenuator croaked.
Do you know whether there are schematics on the web for these? Were they
made in the UK?

This old D66 has served me quite well for low frequency stuff.

which finally gave me a trace I could do something useful with.

My primary probem in attempting to view the noise I was looking for was that the
Tek was triggering on and displaying vast quantites (~1.5V) of ~ 48kHz.

I eventually discovered that simply turning on the TPOS (total piece of shit)
1012 swamped the trace on the Telequipment too !

Ye Gods ! What one earth possesed them to make such a time wasting, RFI
radiating godawful pile of crap ?

I had hard EMI from a TDS220 last week. Had to turn it off as well.
Graham

p.s. don't even get me started on trying to use Ch1 and Ch2 in difference mode
either. Also please don't mention 'menus' ! Sheesh ! Now if I'd had my 465
there........

Don't ever, ever ditch your "old" analog scopes. They are still the best.
 
J

john jardine

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Eeyore wrote: [...]

Ah, yes! Got a Telequipment D66 here but the input attenuator croaked.
Do you know whether there are schematics on the web for these? Were they
made in the UK?
[...]

Yes, UK.
The PDF is 5Mbyte. Send?.
john
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
john said:
Eeyore wrote:
[...]

Ah, yes! Got a Telequipment D66 here but the input attenuator croaked.
Do you know whether there are schematics on the web for these? Were they
made in the UK?

[...]

Yes, UK.
The PDF is 5Mbyte. Send?.


Yes, that would be great. It would make it easier to repair the divider
and most of all, align it afterwards. It's a scope from yesteryear but
it has been good to me. I might give it to a school but only when I got
it back to full functionality.

The shortest email address I have:

jsc <the at sign> ieee.org

All lands in the same inbox. BTW, do you know what happened to the
company Telequipment?
 
D

daceo

Jan 1, 1970
0
Yes, that would be great. It would make it easier to repair the divider
and most of all, align it afterwards. It's a scope from yesteryear but
it has been good to me. I might give it to a school but only when I got
it back to full functionality.
Hi,

Those new tek scopes suck IMO, we get them calibrated and some of them
are right up on the 3% for the volts, How do they do that? And I guess
when you switch to FFT mode that noise is what you see on the
screen.... My current one takes longer to boot up than my old valve
tek use to take to warm up!!! welcome to the 21st century, apart from
that they are OK for simple digital stuff.

My school gave me the above mentioned lovely old tek scope (best part
of 20 years ago) because it was too complicated and no one could get
it to work!!! pick your school.

daceo
 
J

Jim Yanik

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi,

Those new tek scopes suck IMO, we get them calibrated and some of them
are right up on the 3% for the volts, How do they do that? And I guess
when you switch to FFT mode that noise is what you see on the
screen.... My current one takes longer to boot up than my old valve
tek use to take to warm up!!! welcome to the 21st century, apart from
that they are OK for simple digital stuff.

My school gave me the above mentioned lovely old tek scope (best part
of 20 years ago) because it was too complicated and no one could get
it to work!!! pick your school.

daceo

TDS scopes are calibrated on automated test stands.

All TEK cares about is that it's WITHIN the specs,not optimized.
 
E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
daceo said:
Hi,

Those new tek scopes suck IMO, we get them calibrated and some of them
are right up on the 3% for the volts, How do they do that? And I guess
when you switch to FFT mode that noise is what you see on the
screen.... My current one takes longer to boot up than my old valve
tek use to take to warm up!!! welcome to the 21st century, apart from
that they are OK for simple digital stuff.

My school gave me the above mentioned lovely old tek scope (best part
of 20 years ago) because it was too complicated and no one could get
it to work!!! pick your school.

My first scope (a freebie from school - it was considered to be B.E.R.) was yet
another Telequipment as it happens. I have some pics somewhere, I must drag them
out.

I started off with that Telequipment ( valve/tube) very basic - followed by
another valve/tube Telequipment (much nicer and it had real plug-ins including a
lovely differential input with 100uV/cm ? sensitivity on a x100 switch).
Following that a brace of Tek 545s. A 545A and a 545B. Insanely huge but aren't
real dual beam tubes great ? Thereafter a Gould-Adavance OS250B (classic) and
lastly a Tek 645 (no contest).

Graham
 
J

John Larkin

Jan 1, 1970
0
I had the misfortune today to have to use a TDS 1012 !

For the sake of my sanity I won't go into the exactly gory details but amongst
my irritation with it was the way I simply couln't get tit to display anything
remotely like a usable trace. I was just looking for some lowish level audio
band noise btw (actually line frequency hum).

In the end I was able to press into service an ancient Telequipment D67
http://www.shopingathome.com/Telequipment_D67.jpg

which finally gave me a trace I could do something useful with.

My primary probem in attempting to view the noise I was looking for was that the
Tek was triggering on and displaying vast quantites (~1.5V) of ~ 48kHz.

I eventually discovered that simply turning on the TPOS (total piece of shit)
1012 swamped the trace on the Telequipment too !

Ye Gods ! What one earth possesed them to make such a time wasting, RFI
radiating godawful pile of crap ?

Graham

p.s. don't even get me started on trying to use Ch1 and Ch2 in difference mode
either. Also please don't mention 'menus' ! Sheesh ! Now if I'd had my 465
there........


I had a Telequipment scope once, and I thought it was vile. Crappy
focus, flimsy bezel, parallax, funky knobs.

My personal scope, the one I keep in my mini-lab in my office, is a
TDS2012 [1] and I really like it. I haven't had any trouble with
triggering or anything, and haven't noticed any excess emi, past the
mess from Sutro Tower. With the input open, 100 MHz bw, 2 mV/cm, I'm
seeing under 1 mV p-p of random looking noise, nothing I can trigger
on coherently.

Sometimes I front it with an AM502 diffamp for the really little
stuff.

But for line frequency hum, you could just line trigger and signal
average up to 128:1, and pluck the line-coherent component out of
bigger signals. Or FFT and look at the spectrum. Try that with your
Telequipment!

John

[1] plus a Tek 11801 20 GHz sampler, which must weigh 20x the TDS.
 
E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim said:
TDS scopes are calibrated on automated test stands.

All TEK cares about is that it's WITHIN the specs,not optimized.

They also obviously don't care about the radiated EMI !

It was *1.5V* FFS on a normal Tek probe terminated with a couple of ohms ! I was
perplexed to say the least.

Graham
 
J

john jardine

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
john said:
Eeyore wrote:
[...]

Ah, yes! Got a Telequipment D66 here but the input attenuator croaked.
Do you know whether there are schematics on the web for these? Were they
made in the UK?

[...]

Yes, UK.
The PDF is 5Mbyte. Send?.


Yes, that would be great. It would make it easier to repair the divider
and most of all, align it afterwards. It's a scope from yesteryear but
it has been good to me. I might give it to a school but only when I got
it back to full functionality.

The shortest email address I have:

jsc <the at sign> ieee.org

All lands in the same inbox. BTW, do you know what happened to the
company Telequipment?

Tis done.
As Eeyore says, they went to Tek. There's a lot still in use in the UK.
Straightforward, repairable. At the time they were an affordable bench
'scope bought in preference to the Tek items, who's prices were out of
order.
john
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
john said:
john said:
Eeyore wrote:

[...]


Ah, yes! Got a Telequipment D66 here but the input attenuator croaked.
Do you know whether there are schematics on the web for these? Were they
made in the UK?

[...]

Yes, UK.
The PDF is 5Mbyte. Send?.


Yes, that would be great. It would make it easier to repair the divider
and most of all, align it afterwards. It's a scope from yesteryear but
it has been good to me. I might give it to a school but only when I got
it back to full functionality.

The shortest email address I have:

jsc <the at sign> ieee.org

All lands in the same inbox. BTW, do you know what happened to the
company Telequipment?


Tis done.


Thanks, John, got it. Man, I didn't think that D66 scope was this old.

As Eeyore says, they went to Tek. There's a lot still in use in the UK.
Straightforward, repairable. At the time they were an affordable bench
'scope bought in preference to the Tek items, who's prices were out of
order.


And of a rather robust quality I might add. Like my old Hameg which
managed to create a huge outward dent into a car fender when I had to
evade a guy that overshot a stop sign. It still worked like nothing had
happened.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
John said:
I had the misfortune today to have to use a TDS 1012 !

For the sake of my sanity I won't go into the exactly gory details but amongst
my irritation with it was the way I simply couln't get tit to display anything
remotely like a usable trace. I was just looking for some lowish level audio
band noise btw (actually line frequency hum).

In the end I was able to press into service an ancient Telequipment D67
http://www.shopingathome.com/Telequipment_D67.jpg

which finally gave me a trace I could do something useful with.

My primary probem in attempting to view the noise I was looking for was that the
Tek was triggering on and displaying vast quantites (~1.5V) of ~ 48kHz.

I eventually discovered that simply turning on the TPOS (total piece of shit)
1012 swamped the trace on the Telequipment too !

Ye Gods ! What one earth possesed them to make such a time wasting, RFI
radiating godawful pile of crap ?

Graham

p.s. don't even get me started on trying to use Ch1 and Ch2 in difference mode
either. Also please don't mention 'menus' ! Sheesh ! Now if I'd had my 465
there........



I had a Telequipment scope once, and I thought it was vile. Crappy
focus, flimsy bezel, parallax, funky knobs.

My personal scope, the one I keep in my mini-lab in my office, is a
TDS2012 [1] and I really like it. I haven't had any trouble with
triggering or anything, and haven't noticed any excess emi, past the
mess from Sutro Tower. ...


That's like trying to listen to Mozart while taking off in an F-16.


... With the input open, 100 MHz bw, 2 mV/cm, I'm
seeing under 1 mV p-p of random looking noise, nothing I can trigger
on coherently.

Sometimes I front it with an AM502 diffamp for the really little
stuff.

But for line frequency hum, you could just line trigger and signal
average up to 128:1, and pluck the line-coherent component out of
bigger signals. Or FFT and look at the spectrum. Try that with your
Telequipment!

Signal averaging is done by turning off all lights and closing the
curtains, FFT by having a couple shots of single malt and squinting :)
 
B

BFoelsch

Jan 1, 1970
0
Eeyore said:
My first scope (a freebie from school - it was considered to be B.E.R.) was yet
another Telequipment as it happens. I have some pics somewhere, I must drag them
out.

I started off with that Telequipment ( valve/tube) very basic - followed by
another valve/tube Telequipment (much nicer and it had real plug-ins including a
lovely differential input with 100uV/cm ? sensitivity on a x100 switch).
Following that a brace of Tek 545s. A 545A and a 545B. Insanely huge but aren't
real dual beam tubes great ?

Uhhhh, neither the 545A nor the 545B was a dual beam scope. In that era, the
only dual beams were the 555 and the 551. Both of them had external power
supplies.
 
E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Thanks, John, got it. Man, I didn't think that D66 scope was this old.


And of a rather robust quality I might add. Like my old Hameg which
managed to create a huge outward dent into a car fender when I had to
evade a guy that overshot a stop sign. It still worked like nothing had
happened.

After this recent run-in, I intend to restore my Advance OS250B to full working
order.

Graham
 
J

Jim Yanik

Jan 1, 1970
0
I had the misfortune today to have to use a TDS 1012 !

For the sake of my sanity I won't go into the exactly gory details but
amongst my irritation with it was the way I simply couln't get tit to
display anything remotely like a usable trace. I was just looking for
some lowish level audio band noise btw (actually line frequency hum).

In the end I was able to press into service an ancient Telequipment
D67 http://www.shopingathome.com/Telequipment_D67.jpg

which finally gave me a trace I could do something useful with.

My primary probem in attempting to view the noise I was looking for
was that the Tek was triggering on and displaying vast quantites
(~1.5V) of ~ 48kHz.

I eventually discovered that simply turning on the TPOS (total piece
of shit) 1012 swamped the trace on the Telequipment too !

Ye Gods ! What one earth possesed them to make such a time wasting,
RFI radiating godawful pile of crap ?

Graham

p.s. don't even get me started on trying to use Ch1 and Ch2 in
difference mode either. Also please don't mention 'menus' ! Sheesh !
Now if I'd had my 465 there........


I had a Telequipment scope once, and I thought it was vile. Crappy
focus, flimsy bezel, parallax, funky knobs.

My personal scope, the one I keep in my mini-lab in my office, is a
TDS2012 [1] and I really like it. I haven't had any trouble with
triggering or anything, and haven't noticed any excess emi, past the
mess from Sutro Tower. With the input open, 100 MHz bw, 2 mV/cm, I'm
seeing under 1 mV p-p of random looking noise, nothing I can trigger
on coherently.

Sometimes I front it with an AM502 diffamp for the really little
stuff.

But for line frequency hum, you could just line trigger and signal
average up to 128:1, and pluck the line-coherent component out of
bigger signals. Or FFT and look at the spectrum. Try that with your
Telequipment!

John

[1] plus a Tek 11801 20 GHz sampler, which must weigh 20x the TDS.
FYI,TEK did not make the Telequipment,I believe it was their first attempt
at remarketing other companies test equipment.
TEK also sold a Dolch LCD handheld scope rebadged as a "TEK" scope,and sold
Taiwanese low cost function generators,counters,and DMMs as "TEK"
equipment.


It used to be that all the equipment sold in the TEK catalog was made BY
TEK. Not anymore.

I suspect it's more non-TEK than TEK now.
 
M

Malcolm Moore

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Eeyore wrote: [...]

Ah, yes! Got a Telequipment D66 here but the input attenuator croaked.
Do you know whether there are schematics on the web for these? Were they
made in the UK?
[...]

Yes, UK.
The PDF is 5Mbyte. Send?.

I still use a D65 which I bought new in 76 and have the paper manual
which is common to the D66.

There are some other Telequipment manuals at

<http://www.thevalvepage.com/servdata/testeq/telequip.htm>

and they are requesting others. I've been intending to scan my copy.
Do you feel like offering it to them also?
 
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