Posted by jwise0 9 hours ago
And yes, it's a lot of fun bringing these bargain bin pieces of kit back to life.
It can be used a vector RF signal generator with I/Q inputs. The only limitation is the reduced input bandwidth.
I just mainly love the retro-moder look of it. Here's a link to how it looks, for those curious:
https://x.com/slhomme/status/1965131874734584291
I had now idea there was such a huge second-hand market for those. It was such a great opportunity to learn about this tech.
That said, anything with a floppy drive scares me because it undeniably indicates how old it is. My SDS7102V is no Tektronix, but an honest 1 GS/sec and at the time, under $200 on eBay.
Speaking of boat anchors, I'm trying to get my company to buy a DSA91304a (13 GHz scope with SERDES debugging). ~$44K with all the options, but still Windows-XP. The Windows-7 ones unfortunately don't have the options I want. Maybe there is a hack..
You just can’t characterise power rail noise well with less than 500MHz of bandwidth.
I hope you're able to thoroughly test that DSA91304a before dropping $44k on it!
Did you get a price quote for that keysight oscilloscope? I see that you can also rent them for $2000 a month.
The equipment that's bought and sold at the electronics flea market typically isn't used as a means to an end, it is the end. There's disappointment when you buy something there and it just works. There's no fun in that.
I don't really have a use for a R&S AMIQ, but replacing all the PC motherboard caps taught me a lot about good desoldering practices. https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/06/28/Rohde-Schwarz-AMIQ-...
These are just exceptionally bad.
NuColor CRT displays going bad. Bad capacitors. Dallas NVRAM units battery running out of juice
Fried electronics are pretty rare.
Are there specific TDS models that you have found to be better, btw, reliability-wise?
I've got one, they are very cool. I also have a 7834 (storage tube), cool in a different way. On the other hand, they are taking up a lot of space... I also have two 485s, one with a broken trigger.
I'm just wondering how difficult it would be to use a more modern bit of kit in there instead of the Celeron.
People have replaced the RadiSys motherboard with one from a Gateway PC. There aren't a lot of other options though: the motherboard must be an NLX type and that was a short-lived format. It's different for scopes like the Agilent 54831 (https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/03/28/Repair-of-Two-Agile...) that I revived a couple of months ago: people do crazy things with that, making it work with higher resolution LCD panels, upgrading to completely different CPU classes, running Windows 10 etc.
It's remarkable that these scopes have both a PC and a PowerPC motherboard. I think they were a reaction to Agilent scopes: they wanted a PC front-end and reused the PowerPC infrastructure with VxWorks OS that they already had from other generations, so they just slapped an extra motherboard on it.
Meanwhile total mystery to everyone else how to operate/interpret the machine but a lot of fun
Still, entering an easy to generate license key is less intrusive than removing a resistor.
