Retro back in day repair and test equipment.

[Smithdoor]

Back in the 1960's had chance to take repair tech.
Any one under 50 would not give time day.
The techs in there 60's was great source of information.

All most all said samething.
The only equipment electronic need for most repairs was.

1) VOM
2) tube tester
3) RF generator
4) AF generator
5) some day a VTVM.
6) helpful to have a oscilloscope some day.

All rest was ornaments on shelf.

They could test capacitors, coils , bar generator the list goes. With just with list from above.

I hope others can add more comments.

Dave

[G.Castle]

Hi Dave.
Nice old guy who used to live in town, was able to do most repairs to radio with minimal test gear, he said he started with a radio and cycle dealers just after WW2 as a trainee age 15 and the supplied test equipment was multimeter, RF signal gen with internal fixed frequency audio mod, and an RC bridge.

[akuram1]

Originally Posted by G.Castle

Hi Dave.
Nice old guy who used to live in town, was able to do most repairs to radio with minimal test gear, he said he started with a radio and cycle dealers just after WW2 as a trainee age 15 and the supplied test equipment was multimeter, RF signal gen with internal fixed frequency audio mod, and an RC bridge.

This was all we had and all that we really needed. We were fortunate to have a vast stock of radio valves from the early 1930's to present day. Most repairs as you will know resulted in one or two faulty components as it was a breakdown not a restoration.

[Jez1234]

Oscilloscope definitely. Valve tester no. I've never had one and have zero desire to have one (I could have had several FOC years ago). I regard them as completely useless.

A frequency counter would be a nice addition to the list.

Back when I was a young 'un obsessed with electronics I had to manage with basically just a multimeter! It wasn't until I was around 14 or 15 that I had my hands on an oscilloscope and then only because my then best pal became very interested in electronics (he became a "famous" RF expert) and we started collaborating on virtually everything we built. He was lucky enough to have supportive parents who bought him a basic Crotech single beam 10MHz scope which I then had the use of. And a Fluke DMM shortly afterwards!

[Graham G3ZVT]

My experience of the work environment began in 1971 as a bench tech in TV repair workshops for one of the large TV rental firms. Rented TVs were popular here in the UK back then.


1) VOM Absolutely! Typically the British AVOmeter model 8

2) tube tester Most depots I worked at didn't have one, and the ones that did were often acquired privately rather than being company issue. Suspect valves were "tested" by substitution, and we had the luxury of a well stocked stockroom. What most depots did have however, was a CRT tester/rejuvenator of some kind. Again not officially sanctioned, but not banned either.

3) RF generator No

4) AF generator Ditto. I did have a home made signal tracer, built into a cigar tube in the early days.

5) some day a VTVM. Luxury! we had them at technical college, not at work.

6) helpful to have a oscilloscope some day. All depots had at least one. Typically something like a Telequipment D52 or S54 Usually it only made an appearance for a particularly difficult fault.

[Smithdoor]

It is interesting the equipment used in 1970's.

The magazines in the 1960's would show all type of test equipment need. You had to have VTVM.
I had swept generator used one time and went back to just a simple RF generator it wofk better.

What one or two techs said was first clean and check the tubes. Then see if tv work takes fun out of repair. A TV other techs could not get work turn on and work just by cleaning FYI all tubes where good.
Not pitcher of a TV tech I had.
If did not work , look for a burn part if found replace it.

The next part with a good VOM or better VTVM and adjust to the factory voltages.

I never ask when do use all the other test equipment.

Dave

Originally Posted by Graham G3ZVT

My experience of the work environment began in 1971 as a bench tech in TV repair workshops for one of the large TV rental firms. Rented TVs were popular here in the UK back then.


1) VOM Absolutely! Typically the British AVOmeter model 8

2) tube tester Most depots I worked at didn't have one, and the ones that did were often acquired privately rather than being company issue. Suspect valves were "tested" by substitution, and we had the luxury of a well stocked stockroom. What most depots did have however, was a CRT tester/rejuvenator of some kind. Again not officially sanctioned, but not banned either.

3) RF generator No

4) AF generator Ditto. I did have a home made signal tracer, built into a cigar tube in the early days.

5) some day a VTVM. Luxury! we had them at technical college, not at work.

6) helpful to have a oscilloscope some day. All depots had at least one. Typically something like a Telequipment D52 or S54 Usually it only made an appearance for a particularly difficult fault.

[Smithdoor]

Here is a thread I Started on ways to use a VTVM and rf and af generator.
Show how they did with less

https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...d.php?t=203270

Dave

[agardiner]

In the early days of my career, we didn't have RF or AF generators in the workshop. Didn't really need them an RF generator though as plenty of stations back then! Only needed AF for testing amps etc, and for that we just used a tape deck. No tube tester either, no LCR meter, etc.

All we had was a good multimeter and a scope, but we only switched the scope on when we had a TV that kept failing, in order to check the line drive waveform.

Modern test equipment is cheap and plentiful, but as has been said many times, a good multimeter is often all that is needed.

[G6Tanuki]

Apart from the usual meters, scopes etc the things that we used most were :

SWR meter. Initially the cheap ham radio types, then in 1980 I got us a couple of Birds.

RF dummy loads / power meter :: Aspen electronics did some nice ones. We also had a Termaline for one of the Birds.

Regulated 12/24V adjustable power supply, for measuring the extent to which transmit power reduced at low voltage. This was one of our acceptance criteria for any repaired kit before it went back out to a client.

Crystal controlled 10.7MHz and 465KHz markers for zero beating RX/TX crystals.

Deviation was usually set by ear, there was much interest when we got a Marconi deviation meter.

[ms660]

Basically:

Field....Avo 8, plus brains.

Bench....Avo 8, E2 signal generator plus brains.

Oscilloscope and stuff for CTV servicing/setup came later.

Lawrence.

[Smithdoor]

I remember when the VOM came with 100,000 volt ohm meter a lot techs was very happy.

My first year with a VTVM is this year .
But used a Oscilloscope since 1960's and a good VOM

Dave

Originally Posted by agardiner

In the early days of my career, we didn't have RF or AF generators in the workshop. Didn't really need them an RF generator though as plenty of stations back then! Only needed AF for testing amps etc, and for that we just used a tape deck. No tube tester either, no LCR meter, etc.

All we had was a good multimeter and a scope, but we only switched the scope on when we had a TV that kept failing, in order to check the line drive waveform.

Modern test equipment is cheap and plentiful, but as has been said many times, a good multimeter is often all that is needed.

[Vintage Engr]

Interesting,

When I worked for Rediffusion in the early 1960's, we were obviously fortunate to have:
Avo 8's, Avo Multiminors (Field use), RF Generator (Advance up to 220Mc/s), Tube tester (Beamec),
Oscilloscope ( Telequipment, small for field & W/s use) Also a Cossor 1035 'scope. R&C bridge (Hunts), Wee Megger, (I still have it!) Wobbulator, (Samwell & Hutton) Another wobbulator; Cossor Telecheck (I still have it) EHT "Meter"?? (Radar 'Kilovolter'), LOPT tester (Scantest), and also a 'Radar' 405-line pattern generator, which never got used, as test cards seemed to always be available.

Later, one 625-line UHF had started, the only additions were: A degaussing coil, (an RVS special, Looked like a green toilet-seat)- Which was what the customers called it when we went out to install new CTV receivers) A crosshatch generator (Bemex), a fairly useless Philips Rainbow generator and a Philips convergence periscope.

Rediffusion were always very up market when it came to test equipment, so I guess I was lucky. That Philips rainbow generator was of little use. They may have replaced it later with a proper colour bar generator, but by that time I'd moved into broadcast, where test kit was there for the asking, provided one could make a sound case for purchase, and eventually years later and after much persuasion, the Tektronix VM700.

David.

[Sideband]

The test equipment you require must surely depend on what you mainly service. In my case radio and TV, Multimeter (essential), scope (essential for colour TV decoder faults), RF signal generator, desirable for radio alignment, essential for TV alignment, AF generator, nice to have but not essential, valve (tube) tester, nice to have but not essential (although we used one in the shop to test valves that customers brought in...never used it in the workshop). Other things like capacitor bridges are nice to have but most ordinary workshops wouldn't have one. However moving on to more modern times, I would add an ESR meter as essential especially for testing caps in switch mode power supplies and a storage scope with at least a 100 meg bandwidth for checking digital circuits.

If you mainly work on audio amplifiers then you will need most of the above (not the RF generator) together with a distortion meter, probably an audio spectrum analyser and some fancy high-power loads. There must be other things that I've forgotten......

[Smithdoor]

It is interesting how little equipment is need.
If read the ads in 1950's and 1960's

In 1968 you need over $1,000.00 in test equipment today that is over $8,600.
Sorry it in dollars not pounds.

Reality it far less.

I work for as a iron worker / machine and repace a $4.00 guy today $35.00 per hour then he purchased and took the deduction and I got the equipment

Dave

[GrimJosef]

I repair audio amps and aim to get them back to their original spec (or to confirm that this was never reachable ). Since the arrival of the Leak TL/12 Point One and the Williamson amp in the late 1940's 0.1% THD really was reachable and that's well beyond what can be checked with a 'scope. So I use

Multimeters - All the time. Vintage AVOs might well do the job but my Fluke 89 IVs are lighter, more precise and perhaps more durable ? They're a 20+ year old design now, so maybe they scrape in as 'Retro' ? Their AC performance is good enough that I can make basic audio signal measurements with them.

Audio Analyser - My HP8903A contains a very low distortion AF generator (20Hz-100kHz) and measures THD+N with the option of 400Hz high-pass filtering to take the hum out if I want. It has plenty of other features, hardly any of which I ever use. It was released in 1980.

Audio Spectrum Analyser - I have an HP3561A which lets me look at the audio spectrum. Among other things it's very handy for identifying whether any excess hum is predominantly 50Hz or 100Hz and for checking whether harmonic distortion is mostly even order or odd order. It can also reveal any unwanted instability/oscillation up to 100kHz. Again the design dates from the early 1980s. Since calibration services aren't exactly cheap it's a comfort to have two different instruments which are capable of measuring the same thing (distortion) in two different ways. If the 8903 and 3561 agree with one another then that gives me a good deal of confidence that they are both still working properly.

Scope - I do have one of these but I rarely use it. It can check for RF instability, which is handy, and can capture transient noises (clicks and pops) which the other analysers can't (at least not at all easily). It can also tell me about phase shifts.

I have one or two modern instruments too (capacitor checker with ESR measurement, basic LCR meter etc) but strictly speaking they're off-topic.

Cheers,

GJ

[duncanlowe]

Interesting thread. I've worked in a very different field all my life. But the principles are the same.

A DMM can tell you an awful lot if you understand what it is telling you. An awful lot of my working life (and even my hobbies today) had a lot to do with serial bus communications. One wire and two wire. Often a simple DMM test of the apparent DC voltage levels told you all you needed to know, even if you didn't have access to the specific (and expensive) bus analysis tools. I have too many now! Bench and handheld.

For me a storage scope has been invaluable, and personally I like digital ones because of the long storage periods available. My first I used was a Tek mainframe one, and a very obscure one called an Analogic that rarely worked. Today I favour PC based ones.

The other instrument that has helped me a lot. Spectrum analyser. Not important to many, but helped me a lot over the years. If a radio controlled device is unexpectedly not working within it's environment, it can be very revealing what is going on. For example had a situation where two separate 433MHz systems were intermittently failing but always at the same time. The SA with a short bit of wire as an antenna showed an interfering signal, which turned out to be 'howl round' from stupid routing of an antenna cable straight across an active antenna.

[Smithdoor]

It is interesting how we all used simple equipment . After seeing all the special equipment available

The main test equipment back in day and today is still a volt meter {VOM, VTVM and DMM}.

Dave

Originally Posted by duncanlowe

Interesting thread. I've worked in a very different field all my life. But the principles are the same.

A DMM can tell you an awful lot if you understand what it is telling you. An awful lot of my working life (and even my hobbies today) had a lot to do with serial bus communications. One wire and two wire. Often a simple DMM test of the apparent DC voltage levels told you all you needed to know, even if you didn't have access to the specific (and expensive) bus analysis tools. I have too many now! Bench and handheld.

For me a storage scope has been invaluable, and personally I like digital ones because of the long storage periods available. My first I used was a Tek mainframe one, and a very obscure one called an Analogic that rarely worked. Today I favour PC based ones.

The other instrument that has helped me a lot. Spectrum analyser. Not important to many, but helped me a lot over the years. If a radio controlled device is unexpectedly not working within it's environment, it can be very revealing what is going on. For example had a situation where two separate 433MHz systems were intermittently failing but always at the same time. The SA with a short bit of wire as an antenna showed an interfering signal, which turned out to be 'howl round' from stupid routing of an antenna cable straight across an active antenna.

[Graham G3ZVT]

One very useful piece of "test equipment" that is generally not seen as such by most techs is a communications receiver. It can tell you a lot more about a signal than a frequency-counter.

One thing we all had at Granada Rentals in the 70s but I omitted from my previous post was a colour bar generator.

It was all discrete TTL and produced a far from broadcast spec signal, but it impressed the customers. Badged GTVR but made by Labgear. I've still got mine.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by Graham G3ZVT

One very useful piece of "test equipment" that is generally not seen as such by most techs is a communications receiver. It can tell you a lot more about a signal than a frequency-counter..

A scanner receiver is also a handy thing - it can be used to listen for a problematic receiver's local oscillator, the scanner's LO can be used as a signal injector if you know the scanner's IF and can program the required offset, and also a scanner can serve as a 'sniffer' to detect the presence of the IF signal [10.7 or 21.4MHz] on a problematic receiver which will at least tell you that the front-end/LO/mixer are working.

As an impoverished student in the early-70s I fault-found and then 'lined up' on 2M the receivers of a whole bunch of Pye Westminsters using no more than a 'Regency' scanner bought on a trip to the US.

[Wendymott]

I joined a local TV repair shop as an apprentice in 1963. There were 3 "senior" engineers and us two apprentice's The basic repair kit was the Avo 8 Mk 3, Advance Signal generator. Radar CRT Tester. Mullard Auto valve tester, Pickstone soldering iron guns. A TV signal meter, built by one of the engineers. Telequipment S32 scope, which was infrequently used. Then the boss bought a Cossor 1035 DB Scope and a RF Wobbulator, I think it was "his toy" was never used in anger. It was only later with the advent of Colour TV that a pattern generator, and EHT meter were added. I left in 71, and the shop closed not too long after.