An In-Depth Look at a Telequipment D52 Vacuum Tube Oscilloscope
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- čas přidán 4. 10. 2020
- In this episode, we take an in-depth look at a cool old oscilloscope I got my hands on - the Telequipment D52. It’s a pretty late model scope featuring dual traces, and a mixture of tubes and transistors. It’s so gorgeous inside, I couldn’t help but get a lot of beauty shots!
Here’s the manual if y’all want to check out the schematic: w140.com/tekwiki/images/4/4e/T...
Thanks for watching! - Věda a technologie
I studied to be an automation electrician, 2005 or so, in a school in Helsinki, Finland. In the electronics lab all scopes were still CRT. They were part of the workbench panel that had all the power sources, normal meter controls, signal generator and the scope. As part of the teaching we opened up the panels and looked how they were built. There were no tubes inside but the construct was quite modular and easy to maintain.
Remember working on these in colleges and Universities. If I remember correctly, the impressive thing about theses was they were 'dual-beam' as opposed to 'dual-trace' . The CRT employed a beam splitter rather than a chopper circuit in the electronics.
I've never heard of Telequipment before, but this looks like a really solid scope. Impressive indeed
Great find, happy for you!
For faster signals try the H.F. trigger setting and play with the 'stability' control. Back in the day trigger circuits really were not up to par compared to the rest of the 'scope so oscilloscope manufacturers had to include synchronization circuits to get that stable images at faster speeds. Switching to "H.F." turns the time base into a free-running oscillator controlled by the stability knob, so you unfortunately lose the calibrated sweep speed. There's also a feedback path somewhere in there from the vertical amp, because otherwise you'd never really be able to get that stable image (I guess that's done by S102C on the bottom right of FIG2.1, although there's obviously much more going on there), but that means the sweep speed is dependent on the input signal, so any sweep speed calibration really goes away.
Synchronization circuits were commonplace for many years on a whole range of scopes and were only killed with the advent of digital scopes where such tricks just wouldn't fly.
I guess it just goes to show how modern equipment, while more technologically advanced, can also be simpler in some ways.
Thank you so much for your amazing reply!
You definitely know more about these old scopes than I do, and I'm still learning a ton, but that's absolutely awesome! And that actually answers a question I was wondering about in regards to speed. I can see it handling 1 MHz fairly easily as I had 700 kHz showing up crystal clear, but I'm fairly certain the upper limit of the scope is 6 MHz, and I had no idea how that would be possible to display. But, using the "H.F." setting makes a lot of sense. I've still got some more reading of the manual to do!
Modern digital scopes are pretty indispensable and have a plethora of features that are incredibly useful, but there is indeed something special about an old analog scope. I just feel like I'm more connected to the circuit, which I'm sure is 100% a placebo thing, haha.
Thanks again for your awesome insight!
Can you elaborate more on the difference between triggering and syncing on these old scopes? I have a vacuum tube Knight scope. It only seems to sync/trigger and lock on when the sweep speed vernier knob is almost dead-on to stabilizing the waveform anyways. I've been trying to determine if this is just a limitation of this vintage of sync circuit compared to modern triggering or if this scope is not performing as it should be.
Awsome scope. You'll find it much more fun to use than digital ones.
It is a really great scope! It's a total blast to use, but I actually end up using the BK Precision 2120 on my desk far more than anything else. The convenience of it being right there is hard to beat!
I had the big brother of this telequipment scope with removable amplifier modules. It was lovely. I had to make a fairly quick move one year and couldn't take some things with me. I was told last minute nothing could be left. A big Pioneer reference standard laser disc and the scope among big wardrobes and so on were to be removed. I called a local guy to take away the bits thinking he could sell them. I told him the Pioneer was worth a lot of money and the scope a fair few quid. I happened to see him five mins later throwing both items ten feet through the air into the van destroying them. I still don't understand ten years later.
Omg
Cool scopes!
Awesome that you reach out and accept the eclectic devices and share with us. Excellent find, congrats 🐰 - BTW I bought the HP 200CD Oscillator recently based on one of your previous presentations. Excellent add to the lab. Thanks 😊 - at the end it’s like a EKG😎
Look up the siemens oscillarzet if you're already amazed at the small size of this scope. I've got an oscillarzet from 1954, that thing is tiny and beautifully constructed.
I just checked out that scope and it's a really compact tube scope! The board has a really interesting layout of the tubes, they almost seem chaotically laid out, but I'm imaging that's to get the circuit as efficient as possible to the keep the size minimal, which is awesome!
@@UsagiElectric it's really cool imo, not a ton of features but compact and just a cool piece of gear and it's enough for me atm. The weird board layout is also to make all components accessible by just taking the enclosure off. Pretty much everything that might need changing is mounted on posts on the outside of the boards
So cool! And that generator is cool too! Are these air plate variable capacitors zin the generator?
Thank you! Yup, that's a massive variable capacitor that's used for tuning the frequency. You can see them a bit better in my restoration video here: czcams.com/video/EAkiPeC1Xqw/video.html
That HP Oscillator is one of my favorite tools, it's an absolute tank and looks gorgeous too!
Its a long time ago but I still have a few UHF to BNC adaptors...? I imagine you have em sorted, but if not..
Good ol' fashioned CRT oscilloscope. Just like the ones gods used.
Analog CRT scopes are just so cool!
@@UsagiElectric I know... Especially old HP and Tectronics. Those things are beautiful
@@ShubhamBhushanCC Oh man, if I were a richer man, I'd love to get into some old HP gear. Stuff like the old Nixie tube frequency counters are just awesome machines!
Nice old oszilloscope.
my d52 periodically loses the signal.
Cathode Ray goes off / on / off...
Brother, I have one of these, but I'm new and am wondering how you input...um... into it?
I have it tuned to my finger pressing on it makes beautiful lines....but... that isn't a good input.
On the bottom of the front face, there's a little connector port under the "INPUT" text, and that's where you hook the probe up to. But, the Teletquipment uses the older UHF style port and most modern probes use a BNC style port, so it'll probably be easiest to order a UHF to BNC adapter. After that, just grab a cheap scope probe and it should work!
An Amazon search for "UHF to BNC adapter" should bring up the adapters you need, and then a search for "Hantek PP-150" or "Hantek PP-200" should bring up a decent, cheap probe that will work.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
@@UsagiElectric Thank you for the information and inspiration. Would it be possible to hook this up to a synthesizer? That may be a dumb question, but I really am a total noob.
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Can you do horizontal and vertical inputs? Then you could lissajous patterns!
I don't think so, it's got an external trigger input, but I didn't see a Y input on it, although it would be awesome to be able to do some oscilloscope music!
@@UsagiElectric Most dual-trace scopes have an X-Y mode that turns one of the channels into an X input, but looking at the manual, the D52 doesn't seem to have that. This is baffling, because there's a very similar single-trace model (the S52) with two identical amplifiers, one of them dedicated as an X amplifier for X-Y operation. The S52 has a switch on the back for selecting timebase or X-Y mode, but the D52 apparently doesn't. It probably wouldn't be hard to modify the D52 to give it that capability.
Why not replace the case sides with acrylic panels?
That's actually not a bad idea! I may have to do that with something in the future! For this one, I kind of like having the metal case since I end up lugging it around the room, but acrylic would work great for a display piece!
@@UsagiElectric The case is metal for shielding, to cut out external interference.
Brimar valves. Phonetically Bry as in fry, mar as in car.
BRIMAR. Pronounced, BRII-MARR
I knew I was mispronouncing that!
@@UsagiElectric Brimar are now back from the dead, manufacturing new valves in the UK. I often see them a bvws.org.uk events.