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I’ll readily
admit that my favorite courses in college were Quantitative
Chemistry and Electricity and Magnetism, hands-on courses which
allowed you to get into the nitty-gritty intersection of theory
and practice. I
have had a life-long obsession with figuring out how things work
and how well they work. As
a result, my audio DIYing has resulted in drawers full of
self-built LC Meters, Signal Generators, Logarithmic Detectors,
Noise Measurement Devices, Distortion Testers, SWR Bridges etc.
Of course, this
has also led to a motley assortment of Bud cabinets housing the
circuitry and the drudgery of building a power supply for every
project. In this article I will describe how DIYr’s can
relieve some of the tedium, save precious workshop space, and
their wallet by using the TM500 mainframes and breadboards which
are specifically designed for these venerable Tektronix power
units. (I have compiled a listing of the plug-ins manufactured
by Tektronix at the end of this article.) The TM500 series
plug-ins are readily available on the net. In addition,
the cases for the 5000 series Tektronix scopes
can be adapted to fit
The
telecom and technology bubble of the last millennium and the
advent of Ebay now afford us DIYr’s the opportunity of
purchasing high quality test equipment at bargain basement
prices. One of the great bargains is the assortment of plug-ins
for the Tektronix TM500/TM5000 power-mainframes and the plug-ins
which were designed to be housed in them.
These devices can accept from 1 to 6 plug-ins (some
plug-ins will take two slots). A GPIB compatible TM5006 with PS5010 triple-tracking power
supply, two DM511 auto-ranging DVMs,
a DC503A frequency counter and PS503A power supply are
shown below: |
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TM500 series
are available from $20 to $200 depending upon the number of
slots, the abuse the unit has taken and the reputation of the
seller. Broken test equipment doesn’t go to heaven, it finds
its way to Ebay so a fair degree of caveat emptor is
warranted. For the average DIYr a 3 or 4 slot mainframe will
probably be adequate for most purposes and optimize the real
estate on your workbench.
Electrical Hookup
The pin assignments for the
Tektronix 500 are shown below: |
