I was trying to be very very good at this year’s ham swap as I am putting a decent amount of money into my home Theater so only purchased what was ridiculously cheap and or what seemed like would be useful. So that being said, I really didn’t get much as far as test equipment goes, mostly things like this large box of transistors, rectifiers and silver mica caps for a dollar, a box of high voltage caps for a dollar and a bag of goodies that included a full pound roll of 63/37 solder for $2. It also had like 20 of each female and male Amphenol BNC connectors, so I thought that little grab bag was a pretty good score.
My first pick up I only grabbed it because my buddy told me to. He said it would be very useful for me so I did and it was only $30. A Tektronix video and audio combo, a WFM 601M and 764 digital audio monitor. I obviously picked it up for the Audio piece. The brightness potential has been broken off, but that should be easy enough to fix. I was able to turn the brightness knob and this CRT still definitely has plenty brightness in it.
The plastic plexiglass screen cover needs to be cleaned up a bit as it’s making the image a little blurry and I think that’s on the inside. Not entirely sure what this is used for or what I will be using it for, but I figured for $30 is kind of a cool piece. The video side works, but I don’t ever really ever do anything with video, so…
Now onto the main subject of this post, I grabbed a Rigol DG4162. I hadn’t been looking for one specifically, I did, however, have interest in these, as I saw that they were praised by some of the people I watch on YouTube. I was looking at the lower frequency models as they tend to run at better prices, but this one was pretty much brand new with the original box and all the paperwork and he let me have it for $200. That’s why he was asking and I wasn’t going to try to talk him down at all because that seems to be a very good price.
I know this model is a few years old, looks like it was built on the platform of their scopes that were popular a few years or so back, but it is officially my newest function generator if you don’t include the ones that are built in to my Chinese battery operated test piece.
The main question I had for this is do people happen to know if this makes any of my other generators of obsolete? Not really sure if I will be getting rid of them, more so thinking of removing them from the bench, freshen it up a bit. So I’m wondering if either of these two do anything that this new Rigol does not do. They are the HP 3325A and 8648B.
Obviously, the top one goes quite a bit higher at 2 GHz, but never even close to have approached that and I’m guessing the 160 MHz the Rigol provides will be more than enough for 99.9% of what I do. If I ever need more than that, then I guess I could pull this one off the shelf. Obviously the 3325A is even older and more limited, peeking at 20 MHz for a standard sinewave, 10 MHz for a square wave, and 10 kHz for all other types of wave forms. This was the only one I had that did a sweep with the Rigol does. But I thought there was something else that this one did that was kind of special. For alignment of radios I do have a Panasonic FM/AM generator that does stereo modulation. I do know that the distortion of the 2 GHz model is said to be not great, nothing to write home about. Any reason to keep these older pieces and more importantly, much much bigger pieces on the bench over the Rigol?
Dan
My first pick up I only grabbed it because my buddy told me to. He said it would be very useful for me so I did and it was only $30. A Tektronix video and audio combo, a WFM 601M and 764 digital audio monitor. I obviously picked it up for the Audio piece. The brightness potential has been broken off, but that should be easy enough to fix. I was able to turn the brightness knob and this CRT still definitely has plenty brightness in it.
The plastic plexiglass screen cover needs to be cleaned up a bit as it’s making the image a little blurry and I think that’s on the inside. Not entirely sure what this is used for or what I will be using it for, but I figured for $30 is kind of a cool piece. The video side works, but I don’t ever really ever do anything with video, so…
Now onto the main subject of this post, I grabbed a Rigol DG4162. I hadn’t been looking for one specifically, I did, however, have interest in these, as I saw that they were praised by some of the people I watch on YouTube. I was looking at the lower frequency models as they tend to run at better prices, but this one was pretty much brand new with the original box and all the paperwork and he let me have it for $200. That’s why he was asking and I wasn’t going to try to talk him down at all because that seems to be a very good price.
I know this model is a few years old, looks like it was built on the platform of their scopes that were popular a few years or so back, but it is officially my newest function generator if you don’t include the ones that are built in to my Chinese battery operated test piece.
The main question I had for this is do people happen to know if this makes any of my other generators of obsolete? Not really sure if I will be getting rid of them, more so thinking of removing them from the bench, freshen it up a bit. So I’m wondering if either of these two do anything that this new Rigol does not do. They are the HP 3325A and 8648B.
Obviously, the top one goes quite a bit higher at 2 GHz, but never even close to have approached that and I’m guessing the 160 MHz the Rigol provides will be more than enough for 99.9% of what I do. If I ever need more than that, then I guess I could pull this one off the shelf. Obviously the 3325A is even older and more limited, peeking at 20 MHz for a standard sinewave, 10 MHz for a square wave, and 10 kHz for all other types of wave forms. This was the only one I had that did a sweep with the Rigol does. But I thought there was something else that this one did that was kind of special. For alignment of radios I do have a Panasonic FM/AM generator that does stereo modulation. I do know that the distortion of the 2 GHz model is said to be not great, nothing to write home about. Any reason to keep these older pieces and more importantly, much much bigger pieces on the bench over the Rigol?
Dan