Advantest R3261 R3361 repair and modification

[Tantratron]

Hello All,

Very lately I've started to perform EMC pre-compliance testing for a german customer so I've acquired on eBay two legacy Advantest (R3261A and R3361K).

As for the first one, it turned out the amber CRT display to be seriously burned and its main PSU to have lot of leaking capacitors. By some miracle, it does work and when opening some of its boards, the rest seems OK. For sure I'll need to change its CRT by either a new one or find a LCD kit compatible with the digital video generator. As for the PSU again I'll need soon to seriously repair it or find another board or sell the all unit for parts.

As for the second one, it is really in a mint condition so I'll use that one for my actual contract since my budget is very low for the moment.

However I'm very interested to hear return of experience from all of you, like does these R3261 or R3361 are still reliable, interesting to keep operational in a lab or to repair then resell, why some of these sold on eBay are still quite expensive in USA or Korea.

How about the ease to repair these models, are there boards compatible between A serie versus C serie, same with B serie versus D serie... in other words, what does sub-system usually fails on these models ?

How about easy to add a tracking generator into a R3261 so it becomes a R3361 ?

Anymore advices, return of experience would be highly appreciated.

Thank you, Albert

[Ghanou]

Hello All,

Very lately I've started to perform EMC pre-compliance testing for a german customer so I've acquired on eBay two legacy Advantest (R3261A and R3361K).

As for the first one, it turned out the amber CRT display to be seriously burned and its main PSU to have lot of leaking capacitors. By some miracle, it does work and when opening some of its boards, the rest seems OK. For sure I'll need to change its CRT by either a new one or find a LCD kit compatible with the digital video generator. As for the PSU again I'll need soon to seriously repair it or find another board or sell the all unit for parts.

As for the second one, it is really in a mint condition so I'll use that one for my actual contract since my budget is very low for the moment.

However I'm very interested to hear return of experience from all of you, like does these R3261 or R3361 are still reliable, interesting to keep operational in a lab or to repair then resell, why some of these sold on eBay are still quite expensive in USA or Korea.

How about the ease to repair these models, are there boards compatible between A serie versus C serie, same with B serie versus D serie... in other words, what does sub-system usually fails on these models ?

How about easy to add a tracking generator into a R3261 so it becomes a R3361 ?

Anymore advices, return of experience would be highly appreciated.

Thank you, Albert

i also got a broken R3261 recently from a friend, and i found out it has a low level reading by about 40db  @0dbm input level.
will try to post updates as i go along in the repair. btw did you repair yours yet?