As some of you guys probably know, my favorite pastime is in reviving Baby-Discmans. Because I Love these little babies... Walkmans and boomboxes are Great for what they are, Nak cassette decks, R2R and hi-end TTs caress you with the ultimate "sound forever", but lowly Discmans had been providing a background for my everyday living for the last few decades,... I just Love 'em!!! This week, FINALLY, on the Fourth attempted eBay buy(!) I had finally acquired an oscilloscope which allows me to test these little buggers!!! My other crazy fixation is with Black Gate capacitors for the final "coupling" onto the headphones: and I managed to get a few of these also... My Life Is getting back to what it was "before the Woolsey Fire"
That looks to be pretty much the same as the oscilloscope you had before Jorge. You obviously like them. Did you consider anything more modern ? Were the previous attempts just a case of being outbid ? Mister X. We have a couple of these at work. although they use a CRT they are digital with raster scan display. More recent Agilent / Keysight oscilloscopes use LCDs. However, the cheapest are around £500. You can get similar Chinese ones for as low as £200 hence my question. Whether any of them will still be working in twenty years time like this HP obviously is remains to be seen.
I had three failed buys. First HP was defective: seller had a few of those and sent me the wrong/dead one. Another HP was just thrown in a soft box for shipping and arrived in pieces. Then I bought digital 400MHz Tectronix and had a pleasure of confirming that in order to get the "eye-pattern" you need an analog oscilloscope. Tectronix has to be set into "accumulation mode" to get something resembling an eye-pattern. HP54600A is the last "analog" oscilloscope made by HP. 54600B (the one I had before) says that it is "digital" but if released from its default vector mode it is able to show the eye-pattern. Evidently, it is not "digital enough". Another reason I decided to hunt down 54600A is what @Mister X noticed, it is half the size of Tectronix
Thanks for the explanation Jorge. I have read (maybe in a Sony Service Manual) that an Analogue Scope is best for doing an eye pattern. I am sure a modern Keysight Digital one like the 6000 series one we mainly use at work could do it, but as noted those aren't at all cheap.
I had to look it up, in case anybody is wondering, here's HP's Internal Magazine with some insight, this is almost a saleman's brochure for this model, kind of interesting. Hopefully I'll be playing with a scope soon when I have some free time this winter and trying to relearn what I forgot years ago. https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1992-02.pdf