Reviving a $300 Tektronix TDS7104: A Full Refurbishment Saga
Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
A hacker rescues a Tektronix TDS7104 oscilloscope from a flea market for $300, then documents the grueling process of bringing it back to life. The journey involves replacing a dead CMOS battery, imaging a failing hard drive, and even reinstalling Windows 2000 Pro from scratch via a virtual machine and USB boot. Along the way, he shares hard-won tips: don't remove the front panel unless absolutely necessary, and beware of broken plastic tabs. The result? A fully functional 1 GHz scope with advanced jitter analysis, ready for the bench.
Even by today’s standards, the specs exceed those of hobbyist class oscilloscopes, think Rigol and Siglent, though there’s a price to pay in terms of weight, 39 pounds, and volume.
- jlawrence6809
I just had claude walk me through refurbishing a Rohde & Schwarz signal generator from the 90s. It feels pretty cool getting a multi thousand dollar piece of equipment for 60 bucks even if you have no idea what you'll use it for.
- liamkinne
I recently did something similar with a TDS7154B. Rather than going with an IDE/PATA drive I was able to use the SATA Gen1 ports on the motherboard and a molex-sata power adapter to use a modern SSD.
- slhomme
Love this. I knew nothing about oscilloscopes until just a few months ago, when reasearched and bought one from a science lab. It wasfor a personal side project. I gutted it out and installed a mini PC inside, and now i run AI models into it. It's like my personal AI assistance. Hooked up to OpenAI realtime voice, grok bot, claude code, etc so I can command it to do stuff even when my main computer is off.
I just mainly love the retro-moder look of it. Here's a link to how it looks, for those curious:
https://x.com/slhomme/status/1965131874734584291
I had now idea there was such a huge second-hand market for those. It was such a great opportunity to learn about this tech.
- OldSchool
10 GS/sec is very impressive as far as I'm concerned! One sample every 20mm or so at typical transmission line speed.
That said, anything with a floppy drive scares me because it undeniably indicates how old it is. My SDS7102V is no Tektronix, but an honest 1 GS/sec and at the time, under $200 on eBay.
- jhallenworld
Yeah 1 GHz is nice, but that tiny 200 MHz Siglent is going to be much more useful in practice for most things.
Speaking of boat anchors, I'm trying to get my company to buy a DSA91304a (13 GHz scope with SERDES debugging). ~$44K with all the options, but still Windows-XP. The Windows-7 ones unfortunately don't have the options I want. Maybe there is a hack..