--- In TekScopes@..., David DiGiacomo wrote:
The TAS475 and TAS485 are generally not well liked. Service data and
parts are hard to find. Unless you luck out and get a great deal on a
known working scope, you are much better off with a 2445 or 2465
series scope. Much easier to find manuals and parts, and many people
know how to fix them.
I am not sure that the scopes were not well liked by customers, or rather the fact that Tek really did not promote them and watered down their support to the sales force.
These were the very last analog scopes that Tek introduced. It was a time when the world was moving to digital scopes, and Tek was way behind by at least two generations in DSO technology. It was also a time where the performance in DSOs was bad, and with short memory and limited sample rate. It was easy to get a DSO in a mode that "lied to you" and users often resorted to pulling out that analog scope when they saw a strange waveform on the DSO.
Rather than promote Tek's clearly superior analog scope technology to milk a few more years in sales out of it, the head of the scope division down played analog scopes and focused on hyping what they could with their meager DSOs. As such, there was no sales training for the TAS series, and very limited sales support material generated.
In any case, the result was the same as you had suggested ¨C the sales were very low, so there are few of them out there. Parts will be a problem. Service support was to the board level only, so no manual with schematics was offered.
I know the power supply design has some reliability problems.
I am not sure on this, but I believe the CRTs are similar to the 2465 ¨C probably just specification differences. The 2465 was super high volume, and Tek built a dedicated line in CRT production for them. There were several derivative versions of the basic tube, with only specification changes to give different part numbers. Many of the later scope designs used these derivative tubes because the high volume line produced this high performance CRT at relatively low cost.
Steve
