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Old 6th Feb 2014, 10:52 pm   #1
Chris55000
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Default Advance/Gould OS 4072/OS 4074 Repair Hints!

Hi!

Watch this space for repair hints and tips with regard to these very sophisticated British-Made Digital Oscilloscopes that seem to be giving too many members fearful nightmares!

Chris Williams
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Old 10th Feb 2014, 2:37 pm   #2
Chris55000
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Default Re: Advance/Gould OS 4072/OS 4074 Repair Hints!

Hi!

Quote:
Mauritron have been making a business of something which increasing numbers of people are prepared to give away free. The availability of cheap scanners and the internet must have made a difference. In recent years they seem to have been developing their business away from manuals and into other areas. Their business came into existence with the creation of one disruptive technology (photocopiers) and is being threatened by another (scanners and the internet).

It's not fair or reasonable to distribute copies they've prepared. If you've got a copy of a manual and wish to prepare electronic copies and make it available, that's up to you. From my dealings with Mauritron, they offer a reasonably priced service and I've been happy to use them. One thing they offer with their manual collections is convenience.

Cooke and Telford seem to come across manuals as a part of their instrument businesses and as far as I'm aware sell originals, not copies. The manual business is a sideline. I can't see that making copies of originals in your possession is going to threaten their businesses.

As for the question of who owns the copyrights, they will be the property of the company making the equipment in the first place, but they have usually have gone bust or been taken over and split up as they've gone through several hands, so tracking ownership down may not be easy or indeed possible. For instance, Solartron were bought by Schlumberger around 1970. Later they were sold. The name is still in use as part of a group making metrology instruments. I doubt you could find anyone in Solartron/Ametek or Schlumberger who would take the slightest interest in the manuals for a 40 year old valve scope, or a fifty year old high voltage PSU.


HP (Agilent) and Tektronix see it as something as a tribute and selling point that they made so many classic instruments and are starting to make a fair amount available on-line. Back in the day they sold manuals for their kit and had update subscription services, so they would have jumped on anyone selling copies, as they might do today for current production items.

There's also the practical matter of whether anyone would consider suing for copyright infringement in the matter of manuals for a piece of 30 year old kit they haven't made for 20 years and haven't supported for 10 years even on a 'best effort' basis. It would be hard for them to argue financial loss.

Some manuals have government copyright and when the equipment was front-line in the fifties, were subject to the Official Secrets Act. I suppose they still are in theory, but in practice the government ceased to have the least interest in this material after it was flogged off on the surplus market years ago.

I find it very irritating to pick up a piece of equipment say for £30, which is probably unrepairable, and be faced with forking out another £30 or £40 for the manual, to find out whether it's possible to do anything with it.

Pete.
In the light of the above I am going to make the full (254pp + one Addendum sheet) DSO4070-DSO4074 SM freely available on this site, which I have purchased independently of my own free will, (NOT Wme-Bill's copy!) as I feel there are too many people having difficulties with these excellent British-Made DSO's!

This Forum is, and always was, intended for Members to share information, tips and repair hints that have kept so much of the older (repairable!) technology alive that the very great majority of Members, myself included, earned our living on, and in my opinion, once the data has been obtained by legitimate means, wether it be outright purchase, freely given by the generosity of others or "reverse-engineered" from an exsisting item of equipment, should be freely accessible without further payment needed or the need to install disreputable adware-infested "download-managers" to access it, or have to visit specialist repositories!

In addition, I feel that the material contained in this Manual is too valuable and important to be secreted away and offers a valuable insight into a combination of analogue, digital and high-voltage techniques in one piece of equipment!

I will also draft replacement circuit-diagrams with fully-annotated components onto A4 sheets for easy printing, but this will be a long project, so please bear with me everyone!

Please note - I haven't yet been able to purchase one of these oscilloscopes yet as I'm only on Jobseeker's at the moment, so the hints I will provide are based on my experience with other oscilloscopes, industrial electronics, monitors, etc!

I will work thro' the scope in the following order:-

1) PSU;
2) CRT Circuit;
3) Blanking/bright-up;
4) Pre-amps;
5) Vertical plate amplifier;
6) Input triggering;
7) TV triggering;
8) Timebase;
9) Horizontal plate amplifier;
10) CCD Board;
11) Acquisition Board;
12) Display Processor;
13) Microprocessor;
14) RAM;
15) Front Panel;
16) Hard-Copy plotter;
17) Miscellaneous.

As I work thro' each section, I'll scan and post the relavant Original Manual pages with each post to keep the file-sizes down, and my final post will give instructions for assembling a Full Copy of the Manual in the correct order!

Some time in the future, when I can obtain one of these Oscilloscopes myself, I will upload additional material as I can produce it, for example, one project will be a set of gerber-files to make the two Service Extender Cards.

Bear with me everyone, please!

Chris Williams
__________________
It's an enigma, that's what it is! This thing's not fixed because it doesn't want to be fixed!

Last edited by Chris55000; 10th Feb 2014 at 3:03 pm.
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Old 10th Feb 2014, 3:34 pm   #3
muvideo
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Default Re: Advance/Gould OS 4072/OS 4074 Repair Hints!

Hello, this is the second post from me on this forum, the
first one was a request for the manual fo the 4072/4074.

I hope you can proceed with your work, first of all because
I need the manual
And also because I've done this before acquiring a manual
and then uploading it on a free manuals repository,
maybe not a nice thing to do from the manual seller point of view.
But the company was gone from a long time, many people willing
to pay for the manual copy reported that the seller didn't even
answer to their emails etc...
The public manual can help keeping these wonderful devices go
(someone mentioned Solartron? )

Anyway I'm with you !

Fabio
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Old 10th Feb 2014, 8:12 pm   #4
Sparkster77
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Default Re: Advance/Gould OS 4072/OS 4074 Repair Hints!

This will be great as i am sure it will be a great learning tool for people like me.
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Old 16th Mar 2014, 6:51 pm   #5
homebrewer
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Default Re: Advance/Gould OS 4072/OS 4074 Repair Hints!

Hi guys,

I am delighted that so many people appear to be restoring their Gould 4074. GREAT.
We are just doing the same.

Our problems appears around the character generator, and we need urgently :


A) An extender card on loan etc.

B) The character generator ROM, if you happen to have the code we can burn it here.

Or you perhaps have any ideas, tips etc.

Thanking you all

Al:
----
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Old 17th Mar 2014, 1:27 pm   #6
AC/HL
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Default Re: Advance/Gould OS 4072/OS 4074 Repair Hints!

Cross reference: https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...ad.php?t=75710
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Old 25th Mar 2014, 9:55 am   #7
homebrewer
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Default Re: Advance/Gould OS 4072/OS 4074 Repair Hints!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris55000 View Post
Watch this space for repair hints and tips with regard to these very sophisticated British-Made Digital Oscilloscopes that seem to be giving too many members fearful nightmares!
Hi Chris,

Do you have a Gould 4074 display board we could use, to swap over ours for comparison purposes ? Needless to say, we will return it in good shape.

We appear to have a blanking problem. 16 dots.

Kind regards

Al:
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