Hello World, and a Scope

Hello World!

After digging my radios out of storage after about 10 years offline, I figured it would be worth documenting some of my activities online.

As far as radios, my equipment list includes:

• 1 @ Baofeng UV-5R HT (2m/70cm, 4W Max), and CHIRP programming cable for same.
• 1 @ VX-150 HT (2m, 5W max) w/o rubber ducky
• 1 Icom T90-A Tribander HT… somewhere…
• 1 Nagoya 2m/70cm mag-mount Antenna

As a theatrical electrician in my regular life, I’ve got a fair access to electronics gear (solding station, multimeters, wirestrippers and wire of various varieties), but today I picked up a nice piece of radio-specific gear – my first oscilloscope! It’s a used B&K Precision 1535a, rated for up to 35Mhz and 300V RMS.

Used BK1535-a, picked up for $40 on Craigslist. Some stray capacitance issues with that “square wave,” perhaps?

It’s been a little hard to find information on the history of the scope, particularly because B&K don’t list it on their manuals downloads page. Thankfully, Elektrotanya has a copy.

I think this thing will need a little calibration – its built-in 1Khz, 0.1Vp-p port is reading at a little less than 1.1 khz, but that could also be an issue with the calibration signal. More troublingly, it’s absolutely murdering square-wave inputs – you can see one pictured at right – making them look like some fine surfing waves. Not sure what I’m going to do about that, but I’m ordering a new set of probes anyway… we’ll see if that helps.

73