During day 3 of the 3 days long 9 hour per day meeting marathons we have at work every 3 months... in my boredom... I started browsing eBay on my phone.
I found a man selling items for my old piece of electronic test equipment. The thing is from 1972 (50 years old?!)
What I have is an Oscilloscope. It does nothing more than display on a CRT a vertical which is typically magnitude of the thing you are measuring, and horizontal is typically time. Normally an oscilloscope measures voltage or current with respect to time.
Well this thing has the ability to take "plug-ins" and I do not mean air fresheners. It has 2 slots, you put in those slots what you want.
So I can turn the Oscilloscope into something else given I have the proper plugin.
The man had 4 plug ins, to make 2 new things. One set makes the oscilloscope into what is called a TDR (time domain reflectometer), and the other set of of plugins makes the scope into a high speed sample scope.
The TDR is used to diagnose cables and wires and find where they are damaged and by how much, without having to look at the cable. It can "see" defects as small as .1mm long in a cable that is between 2" to 1 mile long! Mind blowing!
The High speed sample scope is a thing that can see events as short as 20ps. That is 0.00000000002 seconds! Back in 1972. Even at work our best devices can't do that and they are NEW! Reading the docs on this thing they describe and show how it works. And it is magic I swear!
Now the units all needed cleaning and tuning and in the case of the high speed sample scope, needed mechanical repair of a knob and associated electronics, which took 3 hours.
But for the low price I could not pass these up. It is crazy, 50 year old stuff that still works and has value today!
So my good news is my geeky electronics "hobby" just got some much needed gear for cheap.
Turns out the man selling these things used to work for the company which made them and he knew what they were and used them and took care of them. They look new. He must have been a tech or engineer there. What a find!