Tektronix DSA 601 Questions - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / testgear

author: Cigarsnob
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2015, 05:45:40 am
content: Recently acquired a Tektronix DSA 601. It came with three cards. Two 2 channel 400 MHz and one 1 channel 1GHz. Powered it on and after it ran a self test, I got one error when it got to the Acquisition section. Please see link below for a picture of the error.After going down a few levels in the options, the scope told me that the error in the Acquisition section is a set of 3 errors: DmxRAM P3 FF, DmxRAM P3 33, and DmxRAMP3 55. The Index code is G3911, G3941, and G3961. Looking these codes up in the service manual states that the area is DmxRAM Pipe3 and it gives me various suspect boards but no no other information.http://imgur.com/a/a7MaWHere are my questions:1) How critical is this? All 5 channels work. Is this something that I can just ignore?2) Does anyone of the schematics for this guy? and the schematics for the 1100 series cards and more specifically, 11A32 and 11A71?Besides being massive and heavy, I am liking the scope. It came with all the documentation/certifications from back in the day. In the menu, it tells me how many times it was powered on and how many hours it ran for. Assuming no resets, this guy was powered on 71 times and was on for 233 hours before I got it. I'm guessing this Acquisition error started early in this scope's life and whoever had it, just stored the unit away or something.I tried searching onine for this scope and I can't seem to find much information besides service manuals. Any help would be much appreciated.

author: steve_tech
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: July 02, 2015, 08:35:19 pm
content: 11K service manuals use board swap techniques. I have seen examples of folks accusing us of being secretive. I think that is partially true since the DSA 601 and 602 were state of the art, top of the line scopes back then. The other reason is they contain parts that most users would not be able to replace (BGA FOR INSTANCE) and ASICs and DSPs all over make signal tracing near impossible.I have two DSA602's for this reason.Steve LindbergTektronix Central Engineering

author: Cigarsnob
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 01:42:11 am
content: Quote from: steve_tech on July 02, 2015, 08:35:19 pmThanks Steve...If I had another DSA then I would totally swap out the boards. Sadly though, I do not. I found this linkhttp://www.electronicspoint.com/threads/tektronix-dsa-602-error.50405/That states that the upper and lower acquisition boards' DRAM were not soldered properly. The past day, I've been spending a little time here and there resoldering all the pins. I also noticed that the connectors (connectors connecting lower to upper acquisition boards) did not have much solder on the pins (it actually looked as if they weren't soldered at all, but I tried pulling on the connectors and they didn't move). Anyway...I've been resoldering it all and just turned it back on a few minutes ago.It passes the self test on the initial power-up, but when I go into the extended diagnostics and run all the test, I still get the same error on the acquisition board.