When I worked at a Tektronix spinoff company, one time they were clearing out a lot of bench equipment, using a blind auction instead of the Dumpster.
Among my haul, I got two large logic analyzers, for $5 apiece, free of Dumpster commingling artifacts.
(This is both a happy memory, and an embarrassing one. After I moved the loot to my cubicle, before figuring out how to get it home without from the rural-ish science park without a car, one of the hardware engineers came by my cubicle, and was admiring the logic analyzers. Being a dumb teenager, with little understanding of adult interactions, I didn't realize until years/decades later that he might've wanted one of the logic analyzers, and I should've offered.)
Years later, I was a grad student, and, amidst a pile of junk in a common area of the lab that was being cleared out, was a NeXT Cube, which someone said I could take home. So I had it in my office (again, no car), and then another grad student comes by, and says they'd already claimed it somehow, so I gave it to them.
Generalizing from two anecdotes: keeping things out of the Dumpster is good, methods are unfair, and, if you score discarded gear from your workplace, then exfiltrate it immediately, to avoid awkwardness.
I'm doing some trash dump diving in a swiss university where I'm studying at and got some nice stuff. For example, now I own a small collection of more than 15 photomultiplier tubes. Some nice (frequently in fully working condition) test equipment like a HP modulation domain analyzer (53310A) and some NI DAQ cards also appears seldomly. The 53310A survived like a miracle. Its front panel was buried beneath a CTI compressor that weighs more than 40kg, but it only suffered from minor damage of the case. The CRT is intact!
However I'm not entirely sure if this is legal and will not bring me trouble. Does these stuff still count as university property even if carelessly dumped into the SBB buckets in the recycling center (usually fenced and locked, but can be opened with student cards)?
I wanted to trash dump into the electronics at the local disposal center in Switzerland and they told me I couldn't because they need to destroy the stuff by law and punishable with 10.000 CHF if not. Don't know about an university though.
Would love to do that too, Swiss companies and universities are so wasteful it’s incredible what goes in the dumpster. It doesn’t even seem like universities try to sell their discarded equipment, they just dump it out of access to the public. How do you find these?
I'm doing my PhD there and from time to time need to throw away a few equipment that are genuinely non-reusable (dead lasers, for example) cleaned out from the labs. Then I got to know the recycling center on campus and developed a habit of looking around for things there.
Lucky you. I know companies and universities trash a lot of repairable or even perfectly good gear, but mere mortals can’t ever access it and so it’s “recycled” (whatever that means in practice)
Would love a connection if you or anyone else reading has one :)
In a reasonable country with reasonable laws, something being deliberately put in the trash by its owner should be considered an explicit surrender of ownership, but IANAL.
Nice write up and gorgeous find. Reminds me of the Tektronix analog oscilloscopes we had a few decades back when I was at university. Great machines, built like tanks and guaranteed to work for many years as opposed to the modern expendable digital gadgets.
It may actually prove to be the opposite case as the capacitors in these old scopes self destruct and eat their own circuit boards and surrounding components.
I have a Rigol and an Agilent over 10 years old now and going strong. Honestly though, my Agilent overheated once and destroyed its own SMPS. This was terrifying given the price of the scope (and at the moment, just knowing -- it was dead and smelled like an electronics fire). I now have a circulating fan on my scope shelf moving air behind and across all my bench equipment.
I replaced that Agilent SMPS for $150? and then got a 2 year service plan for another couple hundred dollars.
The latest Rigol prices are pretty expendable, $299!! but I suspect they will be running for quite a few years.
"guaranteed to work for many years" if you don't need them calibrated I guess.
Also like I'm not sure? A lot of the discrete component and analog stuff on the old models is way more flimsy that the new system on a chip things on the signal path of the new instruments, specially for RF.
Plus if you need data logging it's not even worth to have the discussion on if older gear was better.
> "guaranteed to work for many years" if you don't need them calibrated I guess.
Unless you need traceability for contract or regulatory reasons, oscilloscopes don't need regular calibration. Most of the time, you're probably using them for rough visual confirmations (e.g. is this signal behaving like I expect it to) more than precise measurements. In any case, it's rare for an oscilloscope to go seriously out of whack without a physical insult (like being dropped or exposed to major overvoltage).
I'm pretty confident that I can check the calibration of my scope, with a DMM. I wouldn't do that if I worked in a regulated industry, but in a home lab, we make judgment calls like this all the time.
My main problem with the old analog scopes is that the controls get flakey over time. Also, I do like the measurement and data logging features.
A couple of years ago me and my mother were responsible for clearing out my dad's entire collection of equipment accumulated over a career as an electronics engineer. I know much of it had value but there was too much to deal with so we sold a few obvious items and gave away the rest to someone on a local Facebook ham radio group who could drive round and take it all away. There was certainly a Tektronix oscilloscope like this among it! (Along with spectrum analyzers, test sets of various vintages..)
I'm not sure of the best way to find such opportunities, but I bet there's plenty of kit like this getting thrown out when people's affairs are being put into order by their relatives. It gets me to thinking I should add some tips in my will as to where to give away my technical odds and ends(!)
A good place to start is your local auction house. They are often tasked with disposing of people's estates. Technical stuff usually goes for pennies on the dollar since nobody knows what to do with it.
Years ago we senior engineers stood around while an intern was in the dumpster grabbing stuff for us so we didn't have to get dirty. "No, the other gantry: it's got a bunch of really good stepper motors on it," "Yeah, I can find a use for that big slab of aluminum but you can keep the PLC's if you want..."
Seriously, my boss said to me one day "I know you're kind of a pack rat and we're throwing out a robot arm. If you want it, call Facilities and have them load it into your car."
One time I got a whole entire commercial portable AC unit.
Just gott be there at the right time and have a pickup.
I stopped getting the "parts" kinda stuff a long time ago, I have enough motors/gears/ics in boxes. Now I limit myself to things that work or can quickly be made to work, and have an immediate application in our home.
The same for me! My local refuse centre does not allow anything to be sold or given away once it enters the container for disposal. This is for safety reasons, but it is rather sad: reuse > recycling.
As a former user of these (and many more expensive ones), I can tell you that the most problematic thing is ensuring calibration. We used to have a lot of very expensive stickers on our kit.
One of the advantages that digital has, is that calibration is pretty simple; an A/D step, and then everything after that is gravy.
Well it is probably somewhat depatable as to how much one should care about calibration of an CRO, especially today. The precision is somewhat inherently limited by what you can resolve with Mk1 eyeball on the screen. I have an 4 channel Kenwood CRO on my bench that is intentionally completely out of cal as removing the burned out vertical amplifier gain hybrid modules (complete unobtanium, although one might be able to handcraft that as a SMT board with modern components) makes the thing work for some value of “work” (no vertical vernier, the cal position being on the order of 2x off). But well, it works for looking at powersupply noise in relation to digital signals and similar stuff.
In contrast to that one somehow expects that on a random digital scope functions like measurements work and are reasonably in-cal. And the calibration on digital scopes tends to involve possibly undocumented software, not turning trimmer pots/caps of obvious function while having tongue at a right angle.
The scope in the article actually does measurements. That's what the junk in the "SETUP" block of switches on the far upper right of the control panel is for. It can readout time, frequency, and phase. These were the ultimate analog scopes, and they have surprisingly advanced features.
No, not the museum but place where it was found, or at best someones collection as a display piece. It was fine 20 years ago, but today pretty much self harm compared to amateur level <$1k equipment. You wouldnt use it now same way you dont use 20 year old laptop as a daily driver.
I've got a 465B in the basement that I've had for years now, I should dig it up and calibrate it. Came with the manual and schematics and everything. There's something really nice about using analog scopes.
> There's something really nice about using analog scopes.
There really is, and it's not just hipster-esque nostalgia like people who haven't used them might think.
For one they're not subject to digital aliasing. Sure, they have some bandwidth limitations that can lead to some of the same results, but I've found they're better at smearing the different frequencies on the screen when I'm looking at the scope with not ideal time steps, whereas it's far easier on a digital scope to get something that looks like your signal but is just an artifact of the digital aliasing. There's a lot of nice features that a DSP pipeline unlocks versus an analog pipeline, but sometimes when things get real wonky it's hard to beat an analog scope to make sense of reality.
Back when I was in college, people would go dumpster diving for the really old analog oscilloscopes with the green tubes. They would hook them up to their stereos in spectrum analyzer mode.
We would use the ones like this to actually do work in lab.
Used to own one of these back in school (cheap off eBay). Was out of calibration but still served my needs and was a great scope all round. My only regret was getting rid of it.
Awesome! I've got an old analog Tektronix scope on my desk that I still use regularly. And if I recall, I had to replace a capacitor or two on it as well some time back.
I have the DMS edition with the 4.5-digit multimeter, reads down to 10µV and has the GPIB. A damn handy combination of options. A comparable modern Fluke costs $1200. I found this one on a curb.
Among my haul, I got two large logic analyzers, for $5 apiece, free of Dumpster commingling artifacts.
(This is both a happy memory, and an embarrassing one. After I moved the loot to my cubicle, before figuring out how to get it home without from the rural-ish science park without a car, one of the hardware engineers came by my cubicle, and was admiring the logic analyzers. Being a dumb teenager, with little understanding of adult interactions, I didn't realize until years/decades later that he might've wanted one of the logic analyzers, and I should've offered.)
Years later, I was a grad student, and, amidst a pile of junk in a common area of the lab that was being cleared out, was a NeXT Cube, which someone said I could take home. So I had it in my office (again, no car), and then another grad student comes by, and says they'd already claimed it somehow, so I gave it to them.
Generalizing from two anecdotes: keeping things out of the Dumpster is good, methods are unfair, and, if you score discarded gear from your workplace, then exfiltrate it immediately, to avoid awkwardness.