tverbeure

It's a hobby, not work.

This blog post shows a list price of $24,490 for the base model without options: https://www.jhongelectronics.org/2024/01/tektronix-tds7104-f....

> not HP/Tek/R&S

That doesn't leave a whole lot of alternatives, Mr Lecroy.

One totally needs a 500 MHz oscilloscope to debug a kHz range serial port signal! :-)

My 54825A had a power-up problem: if you unplugged the AC cord for a few hours, pressing the front-panel button wouldn't power on the scope. But if you plugged in the AC for about 5 minutes, it would work fine again.

That sounds like an easy thing to fix, but the whole power-on architecture was a baffling Rube Goldberg device from the button on a small support PCB to the front panel PCB to the PC plug-in card to the power supply. I've never seen anything like it.

I disclosed the flaw to the buyer (the price was very low) and he was excited to have something to work on. :-)

Not sure if you saw it, but before doing the TDS7104, I refurbished two Agilent 54831 scopes: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/03/28/Repair-of-Two-Agile.... For the one that still had a HD, copying the image from to an SSD worked without any issues. However, I also had a 54825A where it didn't work (I sold it, no blog post about that one.) So it's clearly hit-and-miss.

I found the 32 screws of the TDS7104 less of a pain than the dismantling the Agilents which had less screws.

Yes, it's completely separate. There is a PCI2PCI bridge between the PC motherboard and the PowerPC controller board, which has in turn an interface PCB to the acquisition board.

People have replaced the RadiSys motherboard with one from a Gateway PC. There aren't a lot of other options though: the motherboard must be an NLX type and that was a short-lived format. It's different for scopes like the Agilent 54831 (https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/03/28/Repair-of-Two-Agile...) that I revived a couple of months ago: people do crazy things with that, making it work with higher resolution LCD panels, upgrading to completely different CPU classes, running Windows 10 etc.

It's remarkable that these scopes have both a PC and a PowerPC motherboard. I think they were a reaction to Agilent scopes: they wanted a PC front-end and reused the PowerPC infrastructure with VxWorks OS that they already had from other generations, so they just slapped an extra motherboard on it.

I looked for a SMIQ for quite a while to go along with the AMIQ, but eventually settled for the R&S SFQ TV test transmitter that you can see here: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/06/28/Rohde-Schwarz-AMIQ-....

It can be used a vector RF signal generator with I/Q inputs. The only limitation is the reduced input bandwidth.

As I wrote: the TDS7104 is now sitting on a shelf in the garage, next to an Agilent 54831 and some other boat anchors. My daily drivers are a Siglent scope and a puny TDS220, which is about to be replaced by a TDS3052 that I'm bringing back to life. Hobbyists rarely need more than 100 MHz BW.

I hope you're able to thoroughly test that DSA91304a before dropping $44k on it!

Was that by any chance the R&S AMIQ that I refurbished in an earlier blog post?

And yes, it's a lot of fun bringing these bargain bin pieces of kit back to life.

Nice, so I'll get even more entertainment out of it!

The equipment that's bought and sold at the electronics flea market typically isn't used as a means to an end, it is the end. There's disappointment when you buy something there and it just works. There's no fun in that.

I don't really have a use for a R&S AMIQ, but replacing all the PC motherboard caps taught me a lot about good desoldering practices. https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/06/28/Rohde-Schwarz-AMIQ-...

My TDS754D is waiting for the resistor and capacitor mod that converts it from a 500MHz/2Gsps scope into a TDS784D with 1 GHz/4Gsps.

Still, entering an easy to generate license key is less intrusive than removing a resistor.

I think they sold for $60k back in the early 2000s.

I remember a homework where I had to graph some function. I decided use the plotting function of Lotus 1-2-3 for that. The plot worked fine, but didn’t make sense.

I then spent way more time than what I would have spent without the plotter to figure out that a pole and a zero were located right next to eachother.

I had no idea if the teacher had done that on purpose, but it made enough of an impression on me that I still remember it.

The point of math exercises is usually not to get to solution as quickly as possible.

Just go to the Alfa Pendular website and you'll see that the field is marked as mandatory, even when you select US as country of residence. I kind of expect this kind of friction when I book or purchase things in Europe.

You can take that “EU website” broad, as in: any website in the EU.

I just tried to order train tickets in Portugal. Not only do they ask for my passport number, they also ask for your tax id. I will, of course, totally give them my SSN for a train ride… It’s a mandatory field too. People on Reddit say you can just fill in anything, it doesn’t matter, but I hate that kind of uncertainty.

What about it? Apple has an architectural license which allows them to design their own CPUs with ARM ISA. Most companies that use ARM CPUs don’t.

And how did that IP portfolio come into existence? Did it suddenly materialize out of thin air or… did ARM engineers design it?

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt: in your mothertongue, the meaning of “design” is not as broad as in English?

They are great for tracking criminals who cross state lines for medical care.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...

It’s the first thing that came to mind!

They added 3 million CPUs. You reduce the complexity of their systems to a unit test…

I didn’t even know the name for the longest time. It’s only when I wanted to buy some extensions that I realized the cult status of that model, and that’s not (just) because of the name. It’s a truly great design and a shame that it was discontinued many years ago.

> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile.

I love the JERKER desk that I bought 26 years ago, so I assume this rule must be younger than that.

A Cray-1 had 180M flops. Your phone can emulate it as speeds many times faster.

It’s a more important use case, so CPU vendors throw more resources at it.

> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.

No, they don’t do the same thing.

It’s the one time I remember when the French highway toll booths said F that, let’s just open them up and let everyone pass. The August 11, 1999 solar eclipse.

The whole of Northern Europa driving back up, me included.

To bad it was cloudy, not sun to be see. I saw the 2017 one in Oregon though, it was scorching hot but no cloud to be seen.

> HBM3E consumes approximately three times the wafer supply as D5 to produce a given number of bits in the same technology node

That's really interesting, and I wonder why? I believe HBM has redundant ECC bits by default, which would add a few %, but other than that, is it just that the yield is much lower due to die stacking? Of course, this is a 2024 document so things may have changed a bit since.

It has Google Streetview! https://maps.app.goo.gl/5bNdpnHTEjehj1kV8

While that's theoretically possible, it's even harder than trying to do it over, say, PCIe, because the latter at least still has a higher meaning to it while scan chain FFs are just grouped based on spatial proximity.

And of course that's assuming that a) the JTAG port is accessible on these boards and b) the raw scan chain access before scan chain compression hasn't been fused off or isn't locked behind some authentication protocol.

So, no. That didn't happen either. :-)