This morning I woke up at 4:45am, hopped out of bed, and raced to the university parking lot for field day. It’s pretty much a flea market with an emphasis in ham radio and associated electronics. This is a panorama of the parking lot the tailgate was held in, taken from the roof of a parking garage at about 9am. The UCF ARC (the amateur radio club which sponsored the event) is stationed under the white tent.

My goal was to purchase a [working] oscilloscope, and I lucked-out. I ended-up purchasing two, and I’m glad I did! The 1st one (the one with the green circular screen) crapped-out on me after literally 1 minute. (By crapped-out I mean it started spurring thick gray smoke and made my whole apartment smell like a burned marshmallow). At $5, I’m not crying over it. The second one is a 1969 Tektronix 561A 10 MHz oscilloscope. Just think, these things just started started being produced the same year Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I tested it and it seems to be functioning well. At $10, I’m very happy!

The back one there is the one that died on me. The closer one works beautifully, but a lot of the knobs are staticky and there’s a lot of dirt/dust all over it. Inside it looks like a dust bomb detonated. It’ll take enough of my time to restore that I’m thinking of ignoring the older, non-working one. I don’t want to trash it, but I don’t want to store it. Maybe I’ll salvage parts from it? Hmm, vacuum tubes.

Here you can see it attached to my prime number generator described in agonizingly-boring detail over the last several weeks’ posts. It’s attached to one of the microcontroller pins responsible for multiplexing the LED display. Finally, a way to assess high speed power output as a function of time. The output of the microcontroller isn’t performing like I expected, and since it’s a series of pulses I can’t use a volt meter to measure its output. Thus, the need [more like desire] for an oscilloscope.

2 Responses to “UCF Tailgate June 2009”