Products > Test Equipment
Why did Tektronix stop making the great scopes?
<< < (8/26) > >>
free_electron:
I think danaher had not to do with the demise of the 26. Danaher came much later.

The reson these machines disapppeared is because we switched to digital scopes.
Get rig of that costly custom tube, plonk in a computer monitor or lcd. No need for lots of complicated analog stuff. Sample it as early in the chain as possible, dump it in memory, process it.

No need for power supplies that make 20 different voltages for all the differnt blocks including high voltages for deflection. +/- 12 and 5 is all you need.

When tek released ther first digital machines (tds500 series, not the 420 that was a sony product) the market shifted very quickly. Then agilent came along with the infiniium machines and basically stomped al over teks traditional hunting grounds. The idea of combining pc hardware with a samp,er board to make a machine was unheard of in tek land. Hp had both a pc and a tm division so they could do it.

Tek hurt .. Bad .. Divested abunch of its stuff and got borged... Game over.
SeanB:
Making a CRT is easy. But to make a CRT that has 1GHz bandwidth, has less than 1% non linearity over the full brightness range, and which will give a similar brightness irrespective of the beam speed, and where you have amplifiers which have a 1GHz bandwidth and both DC stability and still can drive a 200pF load at 1GHz with 400Vpp and do so linearly is hard.

Using digital sampling to make use of a fast memory, and then simply using a much slower processor to average or something else, and then use a regular 50/60Hz monitor to display ( colour CRT, cheap off the shelf module, god life and no problems with drive to it) the signal, along with info on sweep and such and voltages, is a lot cheaper if you only have to have blistering fast and linear up to an ADC, and afterwards you use fast digital logic which is cheap to make and has no adjustments in production.
Wuerstchenhund:

--- Quote from: free_electron on December 24, 2014, 06:14:46 pm ---When tek released ther first digital machines (tds500 series, not the 420 that was a sony product) the market shifted very quickly. Then agilent came along with the infiniium machines and basically stomped al over teks traditional hunting grounds.
--- End quote ---

Don't forget LeCroy who put on a lot of pressure in the high end, not just on Tek. Even in the 90's the 9300 Series already topped out almost any scope made by Tek and HP (with the exception of MSOs, where HP had a head start).

The fact that the first Infiniium scopes running Win95 were shit didn't help HP/Agilent either.
HighVoltage:
There was another player in the scope market in the mid 90th. It was Philips (Later Fluke) with the Combiscope that could switch by the push of a button from analog to digital. And these Combiscopes offered more in features and bandwidth and memory and clearness of the CRT than any other scope on the market. This must have hurt Tek and HP big time in those days.

For me, Tektronix never really recovered from that downfall.

The old Video of the story of Tektronix is great!
Alex Eisenhut:

--- Quote from: HighVoltage on December 24, 2014, 10:27:02 pm ---There was another player in the scope market in the mid 90th. It was Philips (Later Fluke) with the Combiscope that could switch by the push of a button from analog to digital. And these Combiscopes offered more in features and bandwidth and memory and clearness of the CRT than any other scope on the market. This must have hurt Tek and HP big time in those days.

For me, Tektronix never really recovered from that downfall.

The old Video of the story of Tektronix is great!

--- End quote ---

We had Kikusui in that timeframe.
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod