Products > Test Equipment
Why did Tektronix stop making the great scopes?
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slugrustle:
Oh, I've already upgraded to Cal Test CT4207 probes (and CT4200 and CT4206 for more special purposes).  They have good specs and come with nice accessories.  They're still not as good as the Tek probes, which seem to need some kind of fancy compensation.
David Hess:

--- Quote from: N2IXK on December 24, 2014, 03:11:03 am ---Once Danaher took over, they began dismantling the company, outsourcing as much as they could, and left the company a shell of its former self.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote from: LabSpokane on December 24, 2014, 04:07:35 am ---Tek suffered from a massive amount of brain drain as well as the inefficiencies of total vertical integration.

...

The vertical integration was just a huge albatross. Owning dedicated facilities for everything from PWBs to CRTs to plastics shops that not only molded every knob and case part, they even built all the tooling in-house.  The overhead costs were ridiculous - and only a ridiculous price tag could support it.
--- End quote ---

The extreme lack of vertical integration was a failure as well.

One of the things Danaher got rid of was the wire and cable division.  They could just buy wire and cable from others, right?  The employees were laid off or transferred and the equipment sold for junk before someone noticed that *nobody* could provide cable for oscilloscope probes at any price.  The market simply did not exist, with the result that Tektronix lost the capability of making probes as well.

I think they ended up paying even more for custom cable production after a delay of months where no probes were made.

The plastic shop also made the custom rotary cam switches so when that was lost, so was any design which relied on those switches, and those switches replaced the very expensive relays used on earlier designs.  So they traded the expense of making their own switches with the greater expense of buying RF relays, since at that point they no longer made the relays either.

This was also when Tektronix stopped publishing service documentation.

There were other changes.  Employees were no longer allowed "time off" to work on personal projects using company resources.  They were no longer allowed to buy parts or equipment from the company store.  Tektronix instead paid for surplus equipment to be ground up and thrown into a landfill.


--- Quote from: Jaak on January 21, 2024, 01:23:20 pm ---Danaher screwed Tek and it seemed they wanted to turn it in to a Fluke where they just milked the brand for profit, instead of being a bleeding edge innovator.
--- End quote ---

I saw something about Danaher and Fluke a couple years ago that would explain what Danaher was doing.

They would buy companies and extract the value of the company's brand, ruining it, by loading the company with debt.  Stripping the company of vertical integration would then just be a way to lower costs in the short term before they sold or bankrupted it.
David Hess:

--- Quote from: Richard Crowley on December 25, 2014, 02:28:03 pm ---However, the device development and process development has been based in Oregon since the late 1970s when the Logic Technology Development operation moved up from the Silicon Valley. At any given time we have 100s of people from all the high-volume manufacturing fabs all over the planet are here in Oregon to transfer each new process from D1 to their respective factories from Dalian to Leixlip and Kiryat Gat and points in between.  The product development is done by groups in many places (like Haifa) using the design rules we develop for each succeeding process.
--- End quote ---

Bob Colwell said that besides two major design teams which would alternate because the design cycle was twice as long as the production cycle, individual fabs had design teams doing shrinks and such because it was very very expensive to have a new process come online without a design immediately available for production.
Howardlong:

--- Quote from: slugrustle on January 27, 2024, 03:48:41 am ---My coworker loves the MSO 6 series he's been using at work lately.  I haven't used it myself, but the TPP1000 (10x, 1Ghz, 10MΩ, <4pF, 300V) and TPP0502 (2x, 500MHz, 2MΩ, 12.7pF, 300V) passive scope probes look simply incredible.  I don't know how they do it.  At first, I assumed the 1GHz probes were active, but then I pulled the datasheet.

I'm really happy with my Siglent SDS2000X+ scope, but man, I wish it could use the passive Tek probes.

--- End quote ---

The TPP0250/0500/1000 10x probes all have 3.9pF loading, and will only work with compatible scopes with TekVPI standard, so you're tied to Tek.

TekVPI uses a one-wire interface and each probe has a serial number, so the scope remembers the calibration parameters once you've run a cal. I've always assumed that there's some kind of smart equalisation goes on in the scope front end that's proprietary to Tek, and that's how they manage to get a 3.9pF load.

By the way, the internal construction of the TPP1000 TekVPI connector is definitely different to that of the TPP0250 and TPP0500, so if you have any ideas thatg you could fool a 250MHz probe to work at 1GHz you have some work to do.

So in short, while I agree these passive probes have great loading characteristics, the compromise is that they'll only work with certain compatible Tek scopes.
coppercone2:
i feel like their shit like the MDO SA is glitchy and im not happy with the performance so price is not the problem. freezing trying to take a simple measurement.  |O

if I was seriously dependent on that capability there would be some old HP there. why do I have the feeling the wire and cable guys were the brain of the operation :-DD . I saw a opportunity once to make a board to get rid of some cables and a very experienced engineer was like NO. I thought OK maybe he has a point. years later I see yeah he had a damn good point. I see now just cost pressure was driving me crazy into trying to implement a undesirable design that would basically constrict product development to save a few wires by making everything into a fucking broadway production. Now it translates to me like "KILL THE FUCKING SYSTEMS ENGINEER WITH A CRACKER"

Oh yeah I see nothing great about the 'board mount' modules either that they tried to push to get rid of another cable. Header pin stacks for a power supply for 60 amps. They seem to break. Why do I think if they had a big cable in the back it would be fine? chassis is also paper thin

Also its just a stack of pins on a board that you need to seat a module on. There is also a sticker that says "danger 60 amps" on two exposed rows of header pins. Lose wire in that chassis goes BOOM

they tried really hard to get rid of cables but its still bloody expenisve and it just pisses people that have to work with it wayy the fuck off.

as for the buttons yeah their shit too. I want plastic buttons that click. You graze the fucking rubber on the MDO and it will switch coupling etc. I had about 200 recordings go to AC coupling (for a big shot multi big company evaluation thing! nice delay to explain to my boss you cheap ass mother fuckers!!!! when you work fast to get stuff done your counting on not having to look at the fucking screen to see if settings change) . I don't feel confident at all using that god damn shit no matter how expensive it is


and something is fuked up with the memory too I had it change settings on me when i was away from it. I go through a check list every time I use that thing to make sure its all good now because you can't trust it.

also for some devices during aging studies you gotta get it right or the sample is fucked!!!!!!!! their one time only measurements!!!!!!!! oscilloscopes can be super critical you can't be doing this crap with them!!!! with how god damn unreliable those new switches are I would prefer a fucking matrix board to solder jumpers on to configure the god damn scope, at least I am not worried it will try to fuck me!!!!

and sometimes it failed to trigger when I had other equipment hooked up to the same node that showed me it should have triggered! WHAT THE HELL TEKTRONIX??!?!! DO I HAVE TO SOLDER A MULTIMETER WIRE TO THE CENTER PIN TO PREVENT YOU FROM BLAMING THE GOD DAMN PROBE ? I WANT TO SOLDER A FUCKING ANALOG DIRECT CONNECT MONITOR PORT ON THE SCOPE (DAMN THE SIGNAL INTEGRITY) TO VERIFY THAT THE TRIGGER DID INDEED FAIL AND ITS NOT MY FAULT!
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