Tektronix P5050 shorted cable

[Jwalling]

Never seen a scope probe cable fail shorted before. Open, yeah, all the time...
About 550 Ohms.
Might try blowing the short with a power supply, but I'd worry about it coming back again in the future. I wonder if it could be a tin whisker thing?

[capt bullshot]

I've had this before, too. And it was reported by someone else before, tin whiskers were suspected. Goes away by applying some voltage.
When I tried to use that particular probe (indeed a bunch of probes were affected), I was quite confused until I discovered the short.

[CaptDon]

With the insane price that Tek charged for those 500mhz probes back in the day they sure didn't hold up very well. The grounding was always suspect when the probe lead could twirl around in the body of the 10:1 part that attached to the scope. The little trimmer capacitors were easily damaged when doing compensation adjustments also. What about the crappy probe that was 6mhz in the 1:1 mode and 100mhz in the 10:1 mode!!!! Are you kidding, 6mhz in the 1:1 mode? I have probes from old 10mhz scopes that will do 50mhz faithfully without over/undershoot and ringing. And the crappy low bandwidth probe from Tek was still around $170.