Korean Multifunction Counter Teardown

[Thomas Scherrer] likes to tear down old test equipment, and often, we remember the devices he opens up or — at least — we’ve heard of them. However, this time, he’s got a H…

Everyone Needs A 1950s Signal Generator In Their Life

At Hackaday, we comb the world of tech in search of good things to bring you. Today’s search brought up something very familiar, [Jazzy Jane] has an Advance E1 tube signal generator, the same…

A Vintage AC Bridge Teardown

If you ever encounter a British engineer of a certain age, the chances are that even if they use a modern DMM they’ll have a big boxy multimeter in their possession. This is the famous Avo 8,…

TDS 744A Scope Teardown Fixes Dodgy Channel

There are a lot of oscilloscopes from around the 1990s which are still very much desirable today, such as the Tektronix TDS 744A which [DiodesGoneWild] got his grubby mitts on. This is a 500 MHz, 4…

A Scope Test Tool You Can Build With Just A Pico

Ever wanted to see how well your oscilloscope adheres to its stated capabilities? What if you buy a new scope and need a quick way to test it lest one of its channels its broken, like [Paul Wasserm…

Non Contact Scope Probe Costs Nearly Nothing

[IMSAI Guy] wants you to build a non-contact scope probe. The cost? Assuming you have a bit of wire and a regular scope probe, it won’t cost you anything. Why do you want such a thing? You ca…

80s Function Generator Is Both Beauty And Beast

You know how the saying goes — they don’t make them like this anymore. It’s arguably true of pretty much any electronic device given the way technology changes over time, though w…

Waveform Generator Teardown Is Nearly Empty

We always enjoy [Kerry Wong’s] insightful teardowns, and recently, he opened up a UTG1042X arbitrary waveform generator. Getting inside was a bit of a challenge since there were no visible sc…

Danish Vintage LRC Meter Reveals Inside

Modern test equipment is great, but there’s something about a big meter with a swinging needle and a mirror for parallax correction that makes a device look like real gear. [Thomas] shows us …

Tiny Signal Generator Revealed

There was a time when test equipment was big and heavy. Those days are gone, and [Kiss Analog] shows us the inside of a Uni-T UTG962E arbitrary waveform generator. The device is truly tiny. You mig…

Modern Microcontroller Boosts Classic Logic Analyzer To New Heights

[Ted Fried] recently found a beautiful HP 1600A/1607A logic analyzer set. State of the art in 1975, it looks like glorious Space Age equipment today. He decided to hook it up some modern gear to pu…

ESP32 Oscilloscope Skips Screen For The Browser

An oscilloscope can be an expensive piece of equipment, but not every measurement needs four channels and gigahertz sampling rates. For plenty of home labs, old oscilloscopes with CRTs can be found…

Spectrum Analyzer Buyer’s Guide

Having a scope in a home lab used to be a real luxury, but these days, its fairly common for the home gamer to have a sophisticated storage scope (or two) hanging around. Dedicated spectrum analyze…

Putting The Magic Smoke Back Into A Dodgy Spectrum Analyzer

The trouble with fixing electronics is that most devices are just black boxes — literally. Tear it down, look inside, but it usually doesn’t matter — all you see are black epoxy b…

Arbitrary Waveforms On The Cheap

A signal generator that can produce the usual sine, square, and triangle waves is handy and has been a staple of electronic benches for decades. Being able to craft custom signals opens up new hori…

USB-C Cable Tester Is Compact And Affordable

We’ve all been bitten before by USB cables which were flaky, built for only charging, or just plain broken. With the increased conductor count and complexity of USB Type C, there are many mor…

The Crystal (High Voltage) Method

Do high voltages affect the resonant frequency of a crystal? Honestly, we never thought about it, but [Joe] did and decided to risk his analyzer to find out. He started with some decidedly old-scho…

Own More Than One ‘Scope? You’ve Got Nothing On This Guy!

We’re guessing that quite a few of our readers have a surprising amount of redundant test gear, and we ourselves have to admit that more than one instrument adorns our benches. But we are mer…

A Tale Of Two Pulse Modulators

In the realm of test equipment, there are a number of items that you don’t know you need until you need one. That’s probably the case with the HP11720A pulse modulator. [Tom] acquired t…

USB Meets Core Memory In A Vintage ‘Scope

It’s normal today for even relatively modest instruments to have some form of computer control capability over Ethernet or USB. But five decades ago this was by no means a given, and when Tek…