The Tektronix 585A, from what I’ve read, represents the peak of tube oscilloscope technology. It was originally designed to be a 100Mhz scope, but the plugins never realized this figure. The plugins are interchangeable units that provide vertical amplifiers and all the necessary controls for one to four channels. You can quickly swap between them to change the sensitivity/rise time/etc of the scope. You can see 2 extra plugins on the cart beneath the scope.Surprisingly enough, this 37 year old behemoth fired right up, and has given me little trouble so far. It seems to be more or less calibrated, and has only some minor dust in the controls.

80 tubes of glory!

(click image for full size)

This unit came with four plugins, the cart and a camera attachment, which I’ll detail later, as well as full instruction manuals for everything. Tektronix makes wonderful manuals that not only cover operation, but troubleshooting, repair, calibration, and full schematics for everything. I’m confident there is enough information in the manuals for me to keep it running indefinitely.

If anyone wants more information on the scope, or details from the manuals or anything like that, feel free to contact me. In my googling I’ve noticed that people are still using and repairing these, but many are short on manuals and such.

I’ll post more details on the set-up later.