EEVblog 1536 - How to find a $50 Oscilloscope on Ebay (Part 3)

Can we find a decent $50 analog oscilloscope on ebay?
What about a decent digital storage oscilloscope for less than half the price of a new Rigol?

Other channels:

#ElectronicsCreators #ebay #oscilloscope

[CraigPetersenfb]

I recently found a Tektronix 475A with the DM44, manuals, two P6063 probes in nice condition for $25 at a hamfest. Bought it, gave the switches a good cleaning and replaced the rear feet. It appears that it had been serviced a few years back because it was not suffering from any of the common issues these units have. Went through the routine in the service manual and could not find anything really wrong with it except the calibrator is about 200mV over spec.

[goingnowhere]

AGES ago I got a ISO-Tech ISR622 20MHz for about £20. Still in use, still works for me. Old school, low res, simple CRT...brilliant!

[coldfingersub]

Every time you do a $50 eBay oscilloscope or cheap online the eBay an online guys all raise their price the same day when everybody goes clicking and looking for cheap scopes, the price skyrockets

[Pootycat]

Ah, Israel! I was looking for an HP 410B VTVM. They aren't cheap. But I found ONE, from Israel, that was reasonably priced. BUT....The bloody bastards had CUT off the cables. including the one with the RF probe! A 410B without its super-duper probe is like a vintage Ferrari with its V12 engine removed.

[HL]

Bought mine from the lessons from your last video.
Went for 100 bucks but the seller provided a warranty, the scope had 60MHz and 1 Probe was included.

And for the low end digital scope, I made one from a Raspberry Pi Pico overclocked to 2MSa/s

[coptertim]

When I started my bench scopes were expensive and hard to find. Craigslist is full, I've been buying them and giving them away to students. By the way, I picked up 4 working Teknetics 2 channel scopes for well under $100 USD each. They work great!

[HamiltonMechanical]

I bought 8 scopes in an auction back in 2019, Mostly LG Goldstar OS-9020g, but there were a few others in there as well. Tried to sell them for $50-60 a piece on marketplace and got my A$$ chewed out, finally took them down and just gave them away to folks who wanted them. But i got message after message from hateful people on marketplace saying old scopes aren't even worth giving away. I was horrified! Never listed anything for sale on that despicable place ever again!

[dosgos]

For $50 I got a beautiful analog scope with the digital multimeter. Iwatsu 100MHz scope in new condition. Just keep eyes open for local listings. Scope is in nearly new condition and screen is perfect.

[JeepinBoon]

My advise is ask a ham operator. Half of us have several scopes collecting dust and will not list them on eBay cause we ain’t hurting to sell them.

[ianide]

I scored almost exactly that HP 54645 at a college selling old equipment. I paid $80. Universities are sometimes good sources of test gear, computer equipment, or even some office equipment. If they have a property disposition center anyway....

[RB]

Thanks, you just made the price of all these scopes go way up.

[steviebboy]

Actually years ago someone gave me an old BWD881A Powerscope IIA, it even has a box on the back that you can run it off DC from memory 24 Volts?

[timturner]

Its really hard to justify 100 smackers for a 70s scope unless that's specifically what you're after

[leppie]

I picked up 2 broken Tek 465's for $30. This was just for parts for my working one. Got a front cover and full service manual in pouch (just those I think was worth the money). Narrator: He never got around to try fix the broken scopes.

[jugularSignal]

I was recently rewatching those videos. Scopes spark joy

[beltwesty]

My first brand new Oscope was a Hitachi V355 dual channel 35 mhz unit in the Reagan era. I needed a usable scope for business rather than wasting time with flakey used ones. It still works well today.

In production we used new tek 2210 and we wore out the time base switches and vertical gain switches. Every unit made had tests where the production line used several different settings. Tektronix actually flew to SoCal and video taped time lapse to help believe that we wore them out slow quickly.

Tektronix use to or still? Had this free gizmo at Comdex that had a waveform from hell that only a better scope would trigger on. My V355 would only trigger at one spot while the Teks could trigger all over the waveform.

At one firm we had this Hitachi storage scope that had nice visuals but the trigger circuit was fair. So we used a tek scope to trigger and fed the output to trigger the Hitachi storage scopes.


For someone new to Oscopes a better ebay seller can help weed out the junk and scam units.

[SirMo]

Those HP scopes like the 54645D, have awesome UI and responsiveness. They are just so fun to use.

[cashewmilkfan]

most of the scopes I've gotten have been free from schools or oldie engineers who have a broken unit in their garage. the rest of them were broken cheap and local (but also ancient).

[martinkuliza]

Dave is correct
quite a while back i found a Kikusui 40MHz, Dual Channel CRO

it was listed as being FREE
it was also listed as MULTIMETER
the guy literally didn't know what he had, he apparently bought the property,
which was a 30min drive from me.
When he bought the property there was an under the house section,
when he cleaned it out he found this bulky thing in a case
he totally thought it was a multimeter from 60 years ago

he was willing to give it to me for free.
He turned it on for me
and ... LOL (Because he knew nothing about scopes)
he assumed that the green line meant that it was broken, since it wasn't doing anything
LMFAO
I played along :P

I did feel bad though, I gave him $50 if nothing else but for his trouble.
to this day, Fucking awesome scope
Now, i've bought many more expensive scopes since, but still love my Kikusui

[shariqkudcs]

I own three analog scope and all of them are up to date on components and fully functional one is 1 channel tenma for backup and audio work, another is 2236 100mhz and the other is 2465 300mhz. I got 2465 for free though i maintained it but i am scared of this scope because if it will ever fail, that will become a trash if hybrid is gone. The one i like most is 2236. My recommendation tough they are reliable is to own a digital oscilloscope from latest generation, if if you can find a used one, i would pick it and install heatsinks where ever i can to give it long life.