I recently gave away a 465 that was giving me fits. I don't know what
happened to it, but it had squirrelly problems all over. It was shipped to
Tek for repair in the early 1990's and Tek said it was unrepairable. Of
course I knew better.......

It was used extensively in field service, and was probably vibrated to
death, but it had the damndest problems I ever saw. The ones that really
killed me (other than the vertical attenuator switches) were an oscillation
in the Ch 1 vertical, inability to get a smooth leading edge on a fast rise
(fall was OK) and an intermittently failing intensified sweep. I spent about
100 hours on that thing and never did get it to work right. I don't know if
that had multi-layer boards or not, but it acted like some inaccessible
connections were intermittent. I checked and changed component after
component, and there would always be one more trouble. That was my weekend
for a few months; I would start and go througn the WHOLE calibration
procedure (including the stuff that everybody skips, like swinging the line
to check the power supply at high and low line conditions) to see how far I
could get this time. Undoubtedly I would stop at some point because the
adjustment didn't have enough range or some such. I'd fix that and next week
a different set of stuff wouldn't work. The problems were never expensive
stuff, just resistors and capacitors.

That was the ONLY Tek scope that ever stumped me. I even managed to keep a
647 running, and those NEVER worked.

Yes indeed. The perversity of the inanimate.

So I gave away the 465 and bought a TDS2012. Took a little getting used to,
but I've never looked back. Still have the old reliable 547 and a whole slew
of plug-ins in the corner, but they are going to need a new home before too
long.



"Roy Lewallen" wrote in message
...
If there's any disagreement between what I say and what Jim says about
maintaining Tek scopes, listen to Jim and not me. He was there in the
trenches; I wasn't.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Jim Yanik wrote:

I worked for TEK for 21.5 years as a service tech in 2 of their field
offices;repaired and cal'd a lot of scopes and other TEK products.
. . .