vintage oscilloscope

[baz]

Thinking about buying a older CRT type oscilloscope for trouble shooting older boards around 70s erra like space invaders L shaped and three layer boards.

will a 10 mhz do the job ?

im thinking of something basic like this...

 

[AskJacob]

with an analog scope, be careful regarding the bandwidth. The higher you try and measure, the dimmer the trace will be. 5mhz will be hard to see, and 10mhz will be guesses.

 

So with that in mindm you want to aim your analog scope bandwidth around 2x higher than the kind of signals you want to measure. I started with that exact scope pictured there - and got frustrated very quickly with it trying to work with digital stuff.

 

If you can get your hands on a cheap digital scope, like a Rigol 50 of 100mhz model you can get all your bases covered. Neat things with the DSO are on screen measurements of voltages, frequencies and stuff, and even a memory for trace capture. Cost more, but get more functionality - may be worth seeing what is out there 2nd hand too.

Edited February 3, 2022 by AskJacob

[baz]

10 hours ago, AskJacob said:

with an analog scope, be careful regarding the bandwidth. The higher you try and measure, the dimmer the trace will be. 5mhz will be hard to see, and 10mhz will be guesses.

 

So with that in mindm you want to aim your analog scope bandwidth around 2x higher than the kind of signals you want to measure. I started with that exact scope pictured there - and got frustrated very quickly with it trying to work with digital stuff.

 

If you can get your hands on a cheap digital scope, like a Rigol 50 of 100mhz model you can get all your bases covered. Neat things with the DSO are on screen measurements of voltages, frequencies and stuff, and even a memory for trace capture. Cost more, but get more functionality - may be worth seeing what is out there 2nd hand too.

But will a older vintage scope 10 mhz be ok for older boards thou like space invaders , Pleiades, donkey kong etc?

my plan is to have two oscilloscopes , one more modern 100 mhz , and thought it would be so cool to have a older vintage scope with the crt lol

[AskJacob]

Sure, it could be OK. If you are basically just wanting a glorified logic probe, where you are checking if pins are toggling etc and comparing levels, looking for noise. You can certainly use a 10mhz scope for a lot of that stuff, especially on older boards that have lower clock speeds than modern ones - as this was pretty much the tech at hand at the time.

I sold my old scope for $35 about 10 years ago if that helps you get your head around the price for one of those "boat anchors" 😄

Finally, if you are wanting an analog scope for the cool factor, then just get one! If all else fails you can just hook it up to the stereo and use it as a visualizer 🙂

Edited February 3, 2022 by AskJacob

[Gemini2544]

I have a 40mhz duel trace cro here. I've been thinking of moving it on as I hardly use it.

[thegrunta666]

Make a signal gen, 2 channels, I think its 3 to 1 ration ....

 

[wiredoug]

10 hours ago, AskJacob said:

...you are basically just wanting a glorified logic probe,

^^  read this a few times.    it will save you some money.    great advice.

[needlebat]

It's pretty fantastic the functionality you can get from the cheap digital scopes-from-China.

[IZ8DWF]

On 03/02/2022 at 11:18 PM, baz said:

But will a older vintage scope 10 mhz be ok for older boards thou like space invaders , Pleiades, donkey kong etc?

my plan is to have two oscilloscopes , one more modern 100 mhz , and thought it would be so cool to have a older vintage scope with the crt lol

I've always worked with 200 MHz to 300 MHz analog scopes more or less. Think about the fact that the "dot clock' on the old games will be around 4 to 8 MHz and ideally you will need to see a decent waveform on it to understand what's going on. I've had a very pleasant work with the 100 MHz HP plugins too (in the HP-180A display) when the faster scopes were under troubleshooting or repair.  Just for example, an Asteroids PCB uses a 12-ish MHz crystal oscillator.

To answer your question: No, I don't think a 10 MHz oscilloscope is a very good tool on the old arcade repairs.

HTH

Frank IZ8DWF

[CandyLand]

I would agree, the trace would be quite generic...20mhz however is quite useful on older boards.

Edited June 30, 2023 by CandyLand