Products > Test Equipment

List your test equipment "scores" here!

<< < (444/581) > >>

Berni:
Ah yes this is classic HP construction of RF gear back then.

I had two repairs recently involving power issues on such era instruments. One was my HP 8566B that just needed a new fuse, no idea why it went(Looked fine in the glass but didn't conduct) and another was a HP 4191A (RF Impedance analyzer) that also had fans running but shown nothing on the front panel. Turned out it was a bent pin in a connector for the transformers 5V winding.

It was more work moving these heavy boatanchors onto the bench than actually fixing the trivial problem.

cncjerry:
On your 8566B, though I am against wholesale cap replacement, I had a leaky cap on one of the supplies so they do fail.  The supply was like the -10V or 10V, can't remember exactly, but the cap was a Sprague Powerlytic, 13000uf at 25V. The next time you have the RF unit it on its side you might want to check the ESR of some of the caps.  Mine just game me unlocks and other silly errors, fuse stayed ok.

Jerry

Berni:

--- Quote from: cncjerry on December 17, 2018, 04:08:30 pm ---On your 8566B, though I am against wholesale cap replacement, I had a leaky cap on one of the supplies so they do fail.  The supply was like the -10V or 10V, can't remember exactly, but the cap was a Sprague Powerlytic, 13000uf at 25V. The next time you have the RF unit it on its side you might want to check the ESR of some of the caps.  Mine just game me unlocks and other silly errors, fuse stayed ok.

Jerry

--- End quote ---

I was mostly blaming the mains for that fuse. As the local area developed more houses ware added to the already long line to the transformer substation, additionally heat pumps became a popular way of heating homes here and that put a heavy load on the grid here. As a result i would get fairly low voltage in the mains of around 210 to 220V, this caused the HP 8566B brown out and reboot on a few occasions as it was set for 240V. To fix that i changed the mains selector to 220V and it was fine. In the mean time dad had a solar array installed and things got even worse, to the point where the solar inverter was throwing errors. So i set up a DMM to log the mains voltage over a few days and was shocked to find out it would at times dip to 180V while other times rise to 245V. I shown the graph to the power company and they hooked up there own voltage logger to indeed find the voltage is way out of spec. After some back and forth they finally ran a dedicated new line from the transformer station for this area. And that made the voltage rock solid.

So yeah id assume my unit didn't like being in 220V mode with those sort of swings. Who knows how big of a swing it saw since i was only logging for 3 days and saw overvoltage.

While i was in there troubleshooting the PSU i had poked around to check all supplies being correct and clean of noise, it looked fine, but id did not measure any caps. I have seen stories of the round silver polarized capacitors failing, but there are so many of those spread across pretty much all the boards that replacing those would take forever. Im always a bit intimidated by the complexity of this thing so i sort of hope i don't have to mess with it too much (Tho a lot of it is also due to the fact i hate moving this heavy bastard)

I don't use it all that often but so far it seamed reasonably reliable for how old it is. If i really needed a spectrum analyzer on a regular basis i would have probably went for something a bit more modern and convenient. Heck my 2nd Gigatronics 8GHz synthesizer still has a stuck solenoid in its mechanical attenuator that i still haven't got around to fixing.

Harfner:
A few months ago, while going back to my office, I stopped dead in my tracks in front of a pallet cage full of T&M gear heading for disposal. Obviously they had to clear out an ancient electronics lab.
As I was limited in time (travel next day which still needed preparation) and am limited in space (rented flat, which I share with a female which inexplicably has other priorities) I had to severely limit my choices. So I did not take the 2 oscilloscopes (one 4-channel !) and did not even look up the specs or even remember the model, as that memory probably would have been too painful. I also did not rescue the 4 Fluke 8020A, as my TEA has brought several multimeters in my hands and I do not need another one, however unconvincing that may sound.
What I managed to rescue: HP3478A, HP8116A, Racal Dana 1991, Keithley 2410. You can see the stack before I moved it to the attic.
The HP3478A works as far as I can test, I had to get new button caps and had to replace the ram battery.
The HP8116A seems to work, the NiCd battery just started to leak.
The Racal Dana 1991 had the usual problem, nearly all switches dead, I had to replace them
The Keithly 2410 will definitely need much work. The power section does not work at all, perhaps the custom transformer is dead, it looks overheated.

Specmaster:
Not a bad score that, especially the 3478A.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod