EEVblog #628 - Tektronix 213 Vintage Portable Oscilloscope Teardown

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What's inside a 1975 vintage Tektronix 213 portable oscilloscope/DMM combo?

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[hanky]

I worked for Tektronix from 78-94 in the 400 series O-scopes. 200 series scopes were built in our area. KW is Kay Waldon (I knew her). 02181 is the employee who calibrated it. Some people signed with their employee # some with their initials. Gold pins were first machine inserted then soldered. Tek made many of its own custom parts mainly because of electrical values. Square package IC's were tek made and we called them spider chips. After an Engineering revision many of us technicians would just draw it into our manuals instead of grabbing a new one. The dashed lines coming from switches would go up top to a table with dots showing rotatory cam timing when the contacts were closed. 200 series scopes were calibrated with the boards laid out flat with cables. After calibration cables removed and scope was close up.

[Aussie]

fantastic stuff!, love the 70's electronics :D
especially those gold top ceramic chips :D

[mikeselectricstuff]

The reason for the transformer location is to keep it as far away as possible from the CRT beam path to avoid magnetic interference with the scan.  Probably also carefully oriented and mu-metal shielded.

[charliefoxtrottherd]

For the love of Pete, have a look at those schematics! Good Lord, that is an example of a great engineer who really thought out what a troubleshooting tech would want to have available to him/her when working on this unit. Clear, concise, and the waveform standards for each circuit is a thing of beauty. I would love to have an engineering team like that at my firm. Don't misunderstand me, I have a brilliant team, and they are very clever, but this is old school magic. Thanks for sharing, and I will be having a little meeting with my boys and showing this video to them. Cheers mate!

[stephenwabaxter]

A testament to the innovative design at Tektronix and the longevity of their products.

[mdzacharias]

If you ever get a chance again, I'd love to see a teardown of the classic Tek rotary range cam switches with the gold fingers pressing to the board. Thing of beauty and a joy forever as someone said...

[ian-c.]

Loving that, I can almost smell those antique electrons from here !


Wish I could give this more than one thumbs up !

[Bukkarooo]

Man, I just love the screen on this. The images on it at the beginning are just so crisp and pleasant to look at. One of my favorite teardowns of yours, here!

[cyjo]

Hello; Nice review of this scope! I just had to point out more beauty. The transistors and this odd IC on the bottom PCB are socketed. There are individual gold plated metal sleeves through PCB hole with a tiny rubber or vinyl gasket on top that the individual leads of the IC or transistor pins to plug into! Also the scope input has about a 1 meter length of COAX cable coming out near the rear case screws with a nice compact probe with removable hook! It that wraps around the vinyl channel on the back for storage. Very nicely designed!

[fredflintstone]

I have and still use a couple of models similar to these. A 221, and a 214 (storage). The BNC on the teardown was a mod to the scope as Dave pointed out. Originally the scope lead was connected internally.

[whitcwa]

The vertical range switch uses gray plastic cams to switch small PCB mounted contacts. They used cam switches in a lot of scopres. I believe that the metallic thing Dave pointed to at 23:46 is the detent spring. 

[sharedknowledge]

A friend serviced these in the 80's and said they were easily Tek's least reliable product back then. I don't remember what the specific weaknesses were but I doubt there are many in good working order today. So what you have is likely quite rare. One common issue with Tek scopes of the 70's and 80's is some of the custom chips were relatively short lived and Tek's spares were quickly consumed. Tek refused to pay to have more made (and later sold their custom chip division to Maxim who promptly abandoned all the low volume parts).

Once certain Tek scopes have a custom chip failure the only source for a replacement IC was to salvage one from other non-working scope. But, of course, most of those died from the same problem. The net effect was a lot of expensive Tek scopes became unrepairable junk when they were only 5 - 10 years old. Other manufactures have done a better job both with the quality of their custom chips and managing their stock of spares. In some cases they at least spin a revised board with the same form fit and function using currently available components. Tek couldn't even be bothered to do that.

[CookingWithCows]

the traces are so bendy and wide so that the data running through them at the speed of light doesn't get carried out of the curve and crashes into components.
You know, like when you're in a car and you're too fast and trying to make a sharp turn.

[michaelhawthorne]

That's a nice bit of kit apart from the bandwidth. Nice to see this vintage stuff.
It seems a regular thing on your teardowns of Tektronic equipment, they really put so much thought into the layout and servicing ability. I had a 50MHz Tecktronics scope given to me about 12 years ago but had to sell it for financial reasons, boy do I regret that, now I have a Velleman 60MHz PC scope, not nearly as much fun to mess with.
Thanks Dave.

[johncunningham]

Wonderful piece of technology; hats off to Tektronix and the engineers who had the vision to develop such a amazing scope with a Multimeter. "Incredible"

[geoffroberts]

I have one of these, from the estate of a recently deceased TV engineer. SN is 8043101, so it's a bit earlier than yours based on SN. Can confirm the BNC connector is non standard, in mine, the test probe is hard wired into the unit from the back somewhere. Also mine is 90-136vac (48-62hz 8w) so I can't power it up without a stepdown transformer. I remember this kicking around his shop some years ago... I got the impression it was not working, I'd like to restore it to fully functional, so thanks for the tip about the service manual, I have downloaded it already.

[sysmatt]

The BNC is a popular user mod on those.  The orig models had non-replaceable built in probes!  direct cabled, no connectors. 

[xffox]

Custom Tektronx chips looks absolutely gorgeous!

[MyWillyboi]

Tektronix is amazing!! My step brother's, Step dad, LMFAO, works for them (Tektronix), in design, pretty cool job!

[dedskin]

its better then a lot of new hand held models, in terms of clarity of picture and easy use . this is perfect for someone to get in too field of electronics, measures everything needed . I would gladly use this even today, but cant find them