Welcome • User Guide
ToS • Privacy • Canary
Donate • Bugs • License

©2026 Poal.co

I posted about this some months ago: https://poal.co/s/oldtechnology/774380

I finally decided to try and bring it up, as I'm cleaning things out in preparation for donating unneeded things to a local place that auctions stuff off for operating funds.

I decided not to use my death cheater but instead soldered a power cord to the input connections. I just rawdogged it right to the isolation transformer. To my surprise, it came up - but no sweep, no movement of any sort, just a dot. I suspect that whomever had this before me was trying to solve this problem by replacing every wax paper capacitor in the thing because the internet says so. It didn't work.

Regardless, it has a good CRT and power transformer and other unobtainable items. Hopefully someone can use it. I have no interest in taking it further, I just wanted to see if it worked.

I posted about this some months ago: https://poal.co/s/oldtechnology/774380 I finally decided to try and bring it up, as I'm cleaning things out in preparation for donating unneeded things to a local place that auctions stuff off for operating funds. I decided not to use my death cheater but instead soldered a power cord to the input connections. I just rawdogged it right to the isolation transformer. To my surprise, it came up - but no sweep, no movement of any sort, just a dot. I suspect that whomever had this before me was trying to solve this problem by replacing every wax paper capacitor in the thing because the internet says so. It didn't work. Regardless, it has a good CRT and power transformer and other unobtainable items. Hopefully someone can use it. I have no interest in taking it further, I just wanted to see if it worked.
You are currently inside a comment thread.
Click here to see all the comments (16).
[–] • 1 pt (edited )

It can show amplitude and period of a signal (a "waveform"). If you seen a demostration of cardiograms, this is the same thing, but for more broad and refined applications.

It works like a primative television. You have two drivers for its photon gun, which shoots a beam of light against a phosphorus matrix. In stop state, it appears as a dot, and this dot activates the phosphours, causing it to glow. The Y axis is controlled by amplitude of the input signal. A high amplitude will drive the dot upwards and an inverse amplitude will drive it downwards. The X axis is driven by time, which is user configurable. The beam scrolls left to right, then resets like the worlds fastest lawn sprinkler.

If you had connected to a signal that turned on and off every second, you would see two ranks of horizontal colinear alternating dashes spanning left to right.