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Sony-Tektronix 308 Data Analyzer

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jrharley:
Greetings TE junkies,

A Sony 308 followed me home from a swap meet awhile back. Unit is in very clean shape, powers right up, nice crisp screen. It displays what the manual describes as a fatal error- 03,04, which indicates bad RAM. Since I know nothing about this unit, or anything like it, my ignorant question is this:

Will the unit recognize new RAM chips? And if not, what's involved in getting it to do so? Be gentle, I'm really weak with digital equipment. :)

Thanks in advance for any insight!

JRH

TurboTom:
If you can find genuine 2114L 1kx4 SRAM-chips, swapping them in shouldn't be a problem and the instrument should perform as expected.

Despite the 308 is a cute and at its time probably a versatile instrument, nowadays it's got little but collector's value. It may be useful if you're into repairing of 1980s era instruments that are microcontroller-driven for signature analysis, though. Got one of these oldtimers myself as well...  ;)

jrharley:
Thanks TurboTom! That's actually encouraging, appreciate the response.

Yes, I thought it might come in handy for the stuff I work on. Vintage HP gear from that era for example, comes across the bench now and again. This unit has the basic probe complement I believe, so, if I can get it booting up I might be able to use it to troubleshoot at some point.

I'll look into it a little more then, I think I can source appropriate chips based on initial research.

Thanks again, really appreciate it.


JRH

jrharley:
Sony-Tektronix analyzer update here -

OK, so I tried replacing the RAM chips with what I think are appropriate units. It was tedious to do, but I was able to replace them without deconstructing the board assembly. It's still too soon to draw any conclusions from my limited perspective, but I didn't get a very encouraging result. I've attached a shot of the screen on power up.

Yeah, looks like something is scrambling it up. I'm going to do the deed and take out the board to confirm that I've got the chips in there right, but any feedback on the scrambled display result in the meantime is appreciated.

Later,


JRH

LazyJack:
Congrats for the instrument. Cute little device, very useful for HP style signature analysis. Good that you have the probes, pretty much useless without it.
Are you sure about the RAM? Might be address decoding, etc. showing up as RAM failure. I would look at the associated circuitry, not only the actual RAM chips.
The service manual has quite extensive signature tests, but of course you would need a signature analyzer to troubleshoot this signature analyzer :-(

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