Philips PM3320 - Should I buy this?

[SaabFAN]

I can't help myself: I keep searching for Test Equipment made by Philips, the company my dad worked at for quite a long time as an engineer.
Today I found a PM3320 DSO from 1987 with 250MS/s for 120€. It seems to have intermittent problems with the triggering and I would like to know if someone has information about that scope and its capabilities, as well as any knowledge about that particular problem.

I've already found the service-manual for it and given some pictures I found, the internals of the scope suggest few traps when servicing it (Completely done in Through Hole). Apart from reaching points to measure because of the PC-Like Mainboard/Daughterboard-Construction. But that can be solved with hooking up some wires, I think.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a User-Manual yet, so that would be another question: Does somebody here have one?

thx for the help

[tautech]

I'd make a list of IC's from the BOM in the Service manual and check on availability, stuff of this age might be getting hard to get.
It's worth spending some trouble getting "her" going, "she's" a 200 MHz unit.

[rsjsouza]

Service manual here

[Wuerstchenhund]

I can't help myself: I keep searching for Test Equipment made by Philips, the company my dad worked at for quite a long time as an engineer.
Today I found a PM3320 DSO from 1987 with 250MS/s for 120€. It seems to have intermittent problems with the triggering and I would like to know if someone has information about that scope and its capabilities, as well as any knowledge about that particular problem.

We had these scopes at work when they were current, and a few years later I even owned one personally. They were very advanced scopes when they came out, and I really liked working with them.

But that was almost three decades ago.

In 2015, EUR120 for a >27yr old PM3320 which even needs repair is quite excessive in my opinion. Especially since these scopes are a real maintenance nightmare, and the old age certainly doesn't help reliability.

I'm not saying this lightly but I'd pass on that deal and look for a working analog scope for less than EUR100 instead.

[HighVoltage]

For this price of Euro 120 you can almost get the later models Philips / Fluke PM3370B or PM3380B or PM3390B
All 2 Channel models and very stable. I still use them in some projects, when modern scopes can not do the job.

The PM3320 seems a little old for the price

[SaabFAN]

Thanks for the replies.
It seems I've been looking in the wrong places for scopes. I haven't found any philips scope below 150€ over the course of the last 4 weeks. The cheapest one was my PM3350, which I got by contacting the seller directly on ebay and it was still 150€. But its a combiscope

So judging from your replies, I guess it would be better to grab about 80€ more and get one of the newer models or try to lower the price to about 80 or so.
Btw. yesterday a PM3384 escaped me on ebay at about 179€.

[HighVoltage]

The PM3384 is a 4 Channel version and it will be a little more expensive
Make sure to get the "B" version of any of these models with the latest firmware update v4.1 installed.
Also make sure the scope has the Math and Memory upgrade installed.

The top model was the PM3394B but even with this model there are a lot of different once floating around on ebay, with and without options and some do not have the latest firmware installed.

But even the lowest model, the PM3370B will usually work great and you will probably not have any problems with them.

I had may be around 50 of these scopes over the years, integrated in different projects.
They are good and reliable, even after so many years.
If you are looking for a good analog / digital scope for the best price, this is the one.

[smjcuk]

I stay away from Philips scopes after my 3217 blew a transformer (!). Also I worked for an MoD contractor for a bit and they were blacklisted as nothing but trouble.

[SaabFAN]

Ok, I think I'll stay away from this one. All the vertical amplifiers and trigger-related stuff is populated with a Philips ASIC, for which they do provide the internal circuit, but building a replacement-hybrid inside the footprint of a SOIC-14 Chip is out of my league.
From the more detailed description the seller sent me, the problem seems to be a bit more serious than just intermittent triggering-issues. He said that the scope loses triggering completely for extended durations.

It could be just some faulty caps, Seller says they haven't been replaced, but after what you said, I'm not going to take that risk. At least not for 120€. Maybe for 70^^

Here is the link btw. if anyone of you is interested: http://kleinanzeigen.ebay.de/anzeigen/s-anzeige/oszilloskop-fluke-philips-pm3320a/307535743-168-9461

[SaabFAN]

Well...
Being polite, I did't just say "No!" and instead explained to the seller that the repair could be difficult and expensive because of all the parts I would probably need to buy and then offered 70€, more or less expecting a negative answer.
Long story short: He'll deliver the scope on friday

So expect a Teardown and Repair Thread this weekend. 70€ is about the same amount of money I would have to pay for GTA-V and currently electronics are more fun than computer-games for me.
And with a little luck, I might be able to restore the scope to full functionality and test it with the signal generator I'm currently working on.

[rsjsouza]

Congratulations on the purchase!

70€ is about the same amount of money I would have to pay for GTA-V and currently electronics are more fun than computer-games for me.

Also, 70€ is an investment towards relaxation - you would probably spend a similar amount of money for a "spa treatment"  O0

I do similar things all the time - just to relax, I sometimes take an older board and carefully desolder all its components with an analysis of how the PCB was was designed and each part was assembled...

[macboy]

I have the user manual, send me your e-mail address in a PM and I'll fire it off to you.
Does your unit have GPIB and serial interfaces? This is part number PM8956A and it has its own separate user and service manual, which includes the command protocol for remote operation. I'll send that along too if you don't have it.

update:

I sent you three e-mails: the user manual PDF file, the GPIB option PDF file, and a HTML format user manual that I created.

Mine has the math option, which can do FFT and perhaps a few other things. I've used the FFT to analyze the residual (distortion) output from my distortion analyzer. It lets me see the relative levels of the harmonics.

I have tried the GPIB port, and was able to capture a screenshot (print screen) using 7470.exe, but it was very slow.