Tektronix 2465B Capacitor Replacement and Repair

Recently and randomly I was notified from a friend about a local company liquidation auction for a local Unisys facility that was shutting down. Hoping to score some cool old vintage computer hardware I scoured the item listings to no avail. Nothing was really of interest, a lot of office furniture, shelving units, misc bins of random hardware bits. Ten years ago I would have been all over this auction, bidding on random carts of hardware to see what I can find but I just don't have time or the space for that anymore. After looking at a hundred or so pages of auction photos, one thing did catch my interest.

Hiding on an equipment cart was a Tektronix 2465B, sitting all by itself, the only piece of test gear in the entire auction out of hundreds of lots. I'm sure it was dead, the odds of it working and still being there were very unlikely.  Having a 2445B, I have always wanted a 2465B, being the top of the line version at the time only second to the 2467 with its microchannel plate CRT. I ended up winning it for like 50 dollars including the cart which actually ended up being a really nice heavy duty equipment cart. Even if this scope was totally toast, it would still be a win for parts.

Once I actually picked up the scope and had a good look at it, it was in pretty good shape. The only physical damage was the vertical position knob for channel 2 being broken off, but this was visible in the auction picture. The rest of the scope was in really good condition, clean with no other physical damage.

Tektronix 2465B

Having restored my 2445B and knowing this will need a full re-cap, I ordered all the replacement caps for the power supply and A5 PCB boards. The power supply for the entire 24NN series was basically identical with a few minor revisions. One thing I did notice though was some of the capacitor values were different in this 2465B compared to the capacitor list I had for my 2445B. Instead of placing the order based on my old parts list, I created a new list based off the values in this scope. Some parts on my old DigiKey list were no longer available anyway.

Here is the updated DigiKey parts list:

Quantity	Part Number	Manufacturer Part Number	Description
10	P10267-ND	EEU-FC1E470	CAP ALUM 47UF 20% 25V RADIAL
2	P13465-ND	EEU-EB1H4R7S	CAP ALUM 4.7UF 20% 50V RADIAL
1	P5874-ND	ECA-2WHG3R3	CAP ALUM 3.3UF 20% 450V RADIAL
4	P10769-ND	EEU-FC2A100	CAP ALUM 10UF 20% 100V RADIAL
4	493-10252-1-ND	UMP1H010MDD1TP	CAP ALUM 1UF 20% 50V RADIAL
1	399-7494-ND	PME271Y510MR06	CAP FILM 10000PF 20% 1KVDC RAD
2	399-5410-ND	PME271Y422MR30	CAP FILM 2200PF 20% 1KVDC RADIAL
1	EF2563-ND	ECQ-E2563KF	CAP FILM 0.056UF 10% 250VDC RAD
2	399-7482-ND	PME271M568MR30	CAP FILM 0.068UF 20% 275VAC RAD
2	PCE3777CT-ND	EEE-FK1A330R	CAP ALUM 33UF 20% 10V SMD
2	PCE3833CT-ND	EEE-FK1V100R	CAP ALUM 10UF 20% 35V SMD
2	493-1421-ND	UVZ2E331MRD	CAP ALUM 330UF 20% 250V RADIAL
10	P10323-ND	EEU-FC1H101	CAP ALUM 100UF 20% 50V RADIAL
1	P5856-ND	ECA-2CHG100	CAP ALUM 10UF 20% 160V RADIAL
4	P11236-ND	EEU-FC1V271	CAP ALUM 270UF 20% 35V RADIAL
2	P10345-ND	EEU-FC1J181S	CAP ALUM 180UF 20% 63V RADIAL

Note that I ordered a few extra values of some of the caps to meet price breaks. Total cost came to $30.02 without shipping.

Just like on my 2445B, I always use high quality Panasonic 105 C caps and original replacement RIFA film capacitors. The couple non-polarized caps are 105 C Nichicons along with the two large filter caps. None of the resistors in this power supply were damaged like on my 2445B, so I left them alone on this one.

2465B power supply with new capacitors

For my first power on test, the scope did power up, went through the first self-test cycling the panel LEDs, fan was running, but nothing on the CRT. Intensity controls had no effect. Even the graticule illumination was dead. Timebase, channel, and trigger controls responded to changes so the digital portions were at least working. Checking voltages, some were off and had ripple so I powered down and would wait for the capacitors to arrive.

Once all capacitors were replaced, powering up had the same result as before. Checking voltages they were all in spec now and the ripple I had was gone, but still no display. Time to reference the service manual.

One note on the 2465B service manual, I found three different versions all of which having some slightly different information. None of the info contradicted itself, just some manuals had more information than others. Once of the manuals looked to be for the older version of the 2465B where the A5 pcb was not using surface mount components, this was for early serial numbers . The other two looked to be newer. I ended up referencing all three throughout the repair process.

Following the troubleshooting flowcharts in the service manual, I ended up adjusting the grid bias adjustment which when increasing did give me a working display. Traces appeared along with on-screen graphics, but they were out of focus and had horizontal artifacts across the display. Intensity controls had no effect leading me to believe it was something with the Z axis processing based on the service manual flowcharts. The primary culprit would be the U950 hybrid which handles most of the Z axis functionality.

2565B with grid bias increased

Since I did have a somewhat readable display, at this point I was able to run the self-test routine outlined in the service manual to verify the rest of the functionality. In doing this, the scope passed with no issues, so good news there. I could also check power-on hours and cycles, 15703 and 2440 respectably. About 5k more hours than my 2445B but still not a high amount compared to some 24NN's I have seen that are well over 30K hours.

At this step, having a working donor scope makes troubleshooting significantly easier. All of the hybrid ic's on the main board are identical, with exception to U600 which has a different part number.  165-2393-00 on the 2445B and 155-0237-00 on the 2465B. Reading into this, they are compatible with the exception being that the 2445B version does not have 400MHz bandwidth. So I can use it for testing if necessary, it will just limit bandwidth on the 2465B to something under 400MHz. You would not want to use this long term in the 2465B.

Pulling parts from a working donor scope is always a little scary, I could end up with two non-working scopes in the process but parts are now plentiful on eBay for reasonable money.

2445B donating hybrids to the 2465B

Swapping U950 from my 2445B to the 2465B did fix the display issue. After turning the grid bias back down, the intensity and readout intensity controls now properly function. The display has a nice clear readout and clean trace. Looking on eBay, a working tested replacement U950 is about $50 - $60 which has been ordered.

Checking the rest of the scopes functionality I did notice another problem. As I adjust the horizontal timebase, the trace will disappear after increasing it beyond 2ms. Turn it back down and the trace will reappear. This behavior repeats for all 4 channels and is Y axis independent. Applying a signal has no change on behavior. Either the built in square wave calibrator or an external signal from a signal generator, the scope will lose trigger right around 2ms then have no trace at all beyond 1ms. Changing any setting, 20mhz bw, delayed timebase, other triggering options, etc made no difference. So something is up with the horizontal timebase and / or triggering on this scope.

One first attempt was to swap out the remaining hybrid ic's from my 2445B to the 2465B to at least eliminate another one of them being a possible issue. This ended up making no difference, so the next step will be to go back to the service manual. Their is a lengthy flowchart to debug horizontal trace issues, following this will be my next step. I'll leave this for a part II of the repair.

HP 54503A NVRAM Replacement - DS1235YW to DS1230Y

A few weeks ago I turned on my HP 54503A to find it behaving strangely. While probing a circuit under test, I could not get any waveforms at all. Was very unusual, so ran a quick self test and was greeted with the following:

HP 54503A Selftest Failure - Protected Non-Volatile RAM

This didn't look good.  An important key to the cause of the failures was the failure of the Non-Volatile ram. Most older equipment like this used a Dallas Semiconductor real time clock / NVRAM IC to store the calibration data along with waveform storage. In this case it is not a real-time clock, just a battery backed DS1235YW RAM ic. This classic chip has an internal battery to backup the contents inside, technology that existed way before inexpensive flash memory that has a limited lifetime. Based on the manufacturing date on the late 1980s, this ic was almost 30 years old, way beyond its expected lifetime but about average for how long I see these devices last.

The HP 5450NA family of scopes 54501A, 54502A, and 54503A are really nice scopes readily available for cheap. My favorite part about them is the interface, it is intuitive and lightning fast. Response from button inputs is instantaneous, unlike many modern scopes which makes it a pleasure to use. This was definitely getting repaired.

A quick way to check to see if the NVRAM is indeed the issue is to flip the write protect switch on the back of the unit off and attempt calibration. Once you calibrate this scope, you flip this switch to protect the contents from accidental writing, but in this case I want to re-calibrate it and to do so you must enable writing. Once this switch was changed I ran the calibration procedure for channel 1. It calibrated successfully and brought the scope back to a working state. So this was the only problem and the NVRAM ic will need to be replaced, unless you feel like going through a full calibration every time you power the scope on. Since a full calibration of all channels takes around 25 minutes, this is not ideal.

HP 54503A Main Board

This scope comes apart very easily, the main board slides out of the back with little effort. Once removed the Dallas NVRAM was easy to spot:

HP 54503A DS1235YW

Removing this ic is pretty easy, use a nice fat hot iron and some fine solder wick and the ic falls right out with no damage to traces.

HP 54503A NVRAM Removed

As far as a replacement, the original DS1235YW is not easily available, but the pin compatible DS1230Y is available. It is still made and Digikey sells it for $30. Then there is the eBay source of them direct from China for only $5. While the Chinese version is guaranteed to be a knock off, it does work as I have used them before. I went ahead and used one for this replacement since I have a few laying around.

There are also available pin compatible flash based alternative ics that you can use in this scope, but I have never personally tried them. One last note is as long as you are going through the trouble of this, go ahead and place a socket on the board so in the event your new NVRAM doesn't work, you won't have to stress the board with another de-solder. Here is the replaced ic:

HP 54503A DS1230Y NVRAM

Once replaced and everything is back together, calibration is the last step. Set the write protect switch to off and run through all the calibration procedures. The calibration for this scope requires a 50ohm bnc cable to be fed from two outputs on the back of the unit to each channel is sequence, the scope really walks you through everything. The manual will explain all of this as well, but is really a simple procedure and a really nice feature.

HP 54503A Calibration

When done, set the switch back to write protect, test it out and power cycle it to verify all calibration was held. Good as new.

Anritsu MF76A Repair - Part I

I recently acquired a nice Anritsu MF76A 18GHz frequency counter in a non-working state off of eBay. While older, this is still a very usable counter that goes for quite a bit of money when working. This one sold for cheap so I figured why not, I'm sure I'll be able to get it working. I didn't really need it as I have a good EIP 545A 18GHz counter, but this one looked fun to fix. The images of it indicated that it was powering up and had the cpu portions functional as the display went through its power up cycle and displayed all zeros on the display. Typically with frequency counters in this state and not counting, you either have a failed 10MHz reference or a damaged front end from over-driving the input. I was hoping for the former as I already have a stable rubidium reference I use with all of my gear.

Anritsu equipment is notoriously difficult to repair due to the lack of service manual availability. I ran into the same issue with my second MT8801C communication analyzer / spectrum analyzer that I had purchased in a non-booting state. I was ultimately able to acquire a service manual for it but it took some serious searching and asking around. Once I obtained it, it was nothing like the older HP and Tektronix manuals I was used to. This manual went through a basic troubleshooting process to identify the issue to a board level, no further schematics or information was available (in the manual I had anyway).

Upon arriving, I powered this MF76A up on the bench, it was in good overall condition and did power up as it was supposed to. Upon applying a RF source to either the 200MHz or 18GHz inputs resulted in no counting. In a way this was good, it could indicate an issue further down then the first converter stages. The back of the unit has a switch to either output the internal 10MHz reference or accept an external one. Checking this with a counter, the internal reference is working as expected. Damn. Time to open it up.

The back of the unit had the calibration stickers broken which was expected, this came from a calibration house / test equipment reseller and I'm sure someone mucked around inside with some attempt to repair it. With covers off, everything looked at least complete, this unit was constructed very nicely.

The power supply is tucked into the back of the unit, not the easiest to reach to check voltages, but the power comes off of it and is transferred to the backplane which has wider traces for increased current making it easy to identify. There are no voltage markings or test points on the boards but it was pretty easy to determine which were power. Probing voltages, everything looked fine except for one strange voltage reading which was around +6.8 volts. Also noticing that a -12V rail was present but no +12, I was betting that something simple like a bad cap was holding the +12V rail down to +6.8 volts, very similar to my EIP 545A repair.

Pulling all the boards and reinserting them to locate the source of the issue resulted in the +12V voltage drop being caused by the input IF brick at the front of the unit. This was fed directly from the 18GHz input, the 200MHz input bypassed it and went right to one of the digital boards. As a test I left the 18GHz section unplugged and ran a 50MHz source into the other input. At first there was no response but I realized that one of the coax connectors coming off of the 200MHz input was not connected in the correct location. Whomever had been in this unit messing around didn't put it back together correctly. Once it was where it was supposed to be, success. 50MHz displaying correctly.

So the counter itself is working fine, just the 18GHz converter is causing problems. This was always a concern, you see this often from someone providing too much input and damaging the input section. So while 200MHz is great, 18GHz is why I wanted this counter. At this point I pulled the input brick out and started taking the covers off of it. The cables for this are long enough to allow you to work on it outside of the unit, I so love designs that allow for repairs.

Each side of this brick was made up of multiple boards all of which actually had labeled power input pins. This made locating the problem board very easy. Measuring +12V to ground I was reading roughly 1.2K ohms through all boards. Through process of elimination I was able to isolate the boards that were sinking the +12V down to two boards, both exactly the same. Pulling the +12V cable off of each board returned the rail to normal levels. Both boards were labeled '342U7363', each containing a handful of passives, some transistors and MMICs, along with what looked like a large thick-film precision resistor.

By following the traces on the board and divide and conquering by cutting some traces, I discovered the +12V sinking was actually coming from this large mystery device package. Looking it up, it is an NEC MC-5156 broadband amplifier in a sip package and was nearly shorted from vcc to ground.

Removing these two amplifiers from each board returned the +12V rail to normal, so these two parts were at least indicating to be bad. Was anything else bad? Maybe, it is hard to tell for sure and without a full schematic it is really difficult to trace the signal paths between these boards to guess what else may be blown. Luckily these old amplifiers are still available as NOS from some suppliers, so with two ordered we shall see. Right now with these two amplifiers removed, the unit powers up and counts correctly on the 200MHz input. I am also able to see some RF on the input to each now missing amplifier, so RF is at least getting that far. Is this the only problem? Maybe, maybe not as this would be too easy. I'm betting there are more issues than just this but I can't do any more at the moment until the replacement parts arrive.

Tektronix 2246 Repair Part II

In the process of debugging the strange intermittent display issue on my Tektronix 2246 after re-capping the power supply, things are not looking so good. Things have actually gone from bad to worse. First of all, the short (or open connection) somewhere in this unit which I can return the unit to normal operation by twisting the chassis has been more difficult to find that planned. I pulled and went through the entire power supply again and did not find any issues. Same for all of the connectors, all are seated correctly without issue. Every screw was in place and I checked to make sure there were no poor grounding issues throughout the scope. What happened next is the result of my own stupid mistake (again) which is just making things worse.

In the process of removing the power supply, you have to remove the high voltage anode cable to the crt which is generated in the main power supply. This cable runs out of the supply towards the front of the unit and has an insulated high voltage connector that is clipped on the the metal chassis between the power supply and front panel board. When I was pulling the power supply out for the third time, I wasn't careful and unplugged this connector only a minute or two after powering the scope down. At this point I let the cable go and it fell towards the A16 main processor board letting a nice spark jump from the high voltage cable to the main board most likely due to stored capacitance that had not been bled off yet. I didn't see exactly where it hit, but it didn't matter. The stored voltage had hit the board and I knew damage had been done. Upon reassembly and power up it was confirmed.

The display was in bad shape at this point, everything to the left say 2/5ths of the display was not showing up and squashed into a vertical line. Definitely not good. So now my priorities have changed, now I have to debug this issue to make sure I haven't burnt out something serious like the main display DACs or readout processors as these would most likely be difficult parts to locate and replace.

I started right with the schematic, which was my next stop anyway in locating the intermittent display issue. The full service manual including schematics is easily available for this scope which is another reason why I love the older Tektronix gear. I focused right away at the character generator and display readout circuitry.

After some probing around, I noticed that output from the A16 processor pcb was odd, the horizontal output drive for the display was not looking right, the bottom half of the waveform was clipped which would explain the left half of the display being smashed into a vertical line. Further up the signal path, the signal was looking correct from the DAC and the multiplexer. So the final op amp stage was looking to maybe be the culprit which makes sense as these op amps definitely wouldn't survive a direct high voltage hit.

Output of mux on left, output after op amp on right

So only the final output stage from the A16 pcb was looking bad, this is a good sign as the actual logic does not look to be damaged. Only the final outputs through an op amp look to have been hit. The op amp in question is a TI TL074. There still may be more damage but I'm going to focus on this op amp for now. I didn't have any in my parts bins, so I placed an order for a handful with Digikey which I should have in a few days. Stand by for part III.

Tektronix 2246 Repair

Last year I had talked about how I accidentally destroyed my Tektronix 2246 oscilloscope by removing the cover. There was a small dent in the metal bottom panel that while removing it had snagged a heatsink on a Motorola 151-0846-00 labeled TO-39 transistor, specifically Q702 on the A10 main board. This ended up ripping the pins out of the transistor can leaving me with a unusable scope. Unfortunately this was not a common part and trying to locate one is next to impossible. I had attempted to use a 2N3866A with no success, the scope was definitely not happy with that transistor in it, an original replacement part would be necessary.

I did ultimately find a donor board. Late last year I found a complete used replacement board on eBay for around $40 which contained both of the 151-0846-00 labeled transistors. This option was definitely cheaper than a whole parts scope and I would hate to ruin another 2246 which may be repairable just for this one transistor. Once I replaced this transistor in my 2246 it was good as new.

I want to focus the attention now to a second Tek 2246 scope that I own with its own set of troubles. I purchased another 2246 a few years ago for cheap, I think it was only around $100. This scope had a lot more use than my original one, while it was in good cosmetic shape it had some issues mostly related to old capacitors. The display was not stable, the character generated osd and cursors would jump around and upon probing the supply rails you could see there was some noise present. A re-cap would be necessary and possibly some additional caps on the A-10 main pcb if necessary.

The 2246 main power supply is pretty basic, much more simple to work on than the Tektronix 2445B power supply which I have also done. One interesting observation upon accessing it is that all of the caps look to be large axial electrolytics:

Trktronix 2446 Power Supply

The bottom of the board told a different story, and once removing a capacitor and testing it was indeed a standard radial cap with an interesting third lead out the top that wasn't connected to anything. Maybe it was designed for additional stability? I know this scope was a popular portable model so my guess it was just some additional ruggedness built into the design. Interesting regardless, at least I can replace them with standard radial caps which are much easier to source.

Replacement caps were all Panasonic 105 degree C. units which are always my first choice, then using Nichicon capacitors in cases where the Panasonic's were not available. The final rebuilt version looked like this:

Tek 2446 Power Supply Rebuild

Quite a difference in size. For good measure I also replaced all of the high voltage film capacitors on the board, many looked stressed as they did in the 2445B. I left the large primary switching capacitor alone, they are rarely every a source of trouble. Everything else looked okay.

This is where things started to get interesting. After putting everything together and powering the scope back up, I had strange display issues. The entire display was shifted left. I started looking around to see if I had missed a cable or possibly had a connector loose during the reassembly but didn't see anything obvious. This scope was working just fine before the power supply rebuild so this issue was definitely something that I caused. At this time I went to turn the scope over on its side while powered up that the display snapped back into alignment. After some more poking around I realized that if I put pressure on the chassis, twisting it just lightly I could get the display back in alignment. So it must be a bad ground, loose connector, bad solder joint, or some other mechanical failure where putting pressure on the chassis would complete whatever broken connection was occurring. It will just be a matter of tracing down where the issue is at. More to come in part II.