So my neighbor is cleaning out somebody's barn, taking scrap-iron to the recycler. He asks me if I know anything about electronics, he's got some things with knobs and screens.
I find about two pickup-truck loads of "gear" dumped in the mud in the rain. Much of it is microwave stuff, bolometers; more is video, phasemeters. There's a company tag, they did leading-edge video surveillance from the 1960s to now. All this stuff is very 1960s. Much of it has had parts gently removed: I'm sure that into the 1980s they kept these boxes as spare-part donors for other boxes still in service. I gather an employee took this stuff, retired, and stored it in his barn until he realized he was never going to do anything with it. Then my neighbor scooped it onto his truck and dumped it for scrap-sorting.
Of that near-ton of stuff, about to be sold for pennies a pound, all I could find worth snagging was a Simpson meter full of green yuck, and an H-P 120B 'scope.
I dry it out, wipe some dirt off. Hmmmm, look at that big hole in the top, like it was stabbed by a small fork-lift. And I'm turning it around and around.... where do you plug it in?
I get the manual, and an old lamp-cord, and hay-wire it.
It works. It shows 60Hz finger-buzz, it shows the internal (neon-lamp!) calibrator, and the calibration seems better than 5%. Brightness is ample and focus is fine.
There's enough vertical shift when V.Gain is turned to tell me something isn't as perfect as it was in 1991 (the last calibration sticker). But so close that it may cook-out (reform the main caps, getter the input tube, dry the mud). Switches glitchy, but I've had worse.
Way-cool pot-metal die-cast bezel around the screen, like something from a 1957 Imperial.
Topic: BASIC 'scope -- saved from crusher (Read 5232 times)