Chuck, Thanks for your explanations. I gathered from HP Journals from september 1973 that option 004 was indeed an upgrade for the 5060A and 5061A, using a dual Cesium ions beam in a slightly longer tube So size does matter sometimes ! I also read abour the HP 10638A external degauss accessory (two level AC power supply form what I understand), but not about the AC/DC heater issue. These tubes also had a shorter life: about half the original one, which would account nicely for the double ion beam, so mine may well be pumped out; its warranty expired in 1985.
I put pictures of it on the web: http://tichu.free.fr/HP_5060A/ As con can see, some controls on the front were removed (scavenged ?), but the oven labels have been painted over: was it part of the option 004 tube upgrade ? About the manuals: would you consider parting from them ? or lending them to a good soul that could scan them and build a PDF for the HP archives or agilent website ? > Re: HP 5060A option 004 (Chuck Norton) > > Hi Marc, sorry I forgot to mention about the option 004. When the 5060 was > being built, there were no high > performance tubes as such. Even when the 5061A was originally released, there > wasn't one available for it either. > The option 004 tube came along later. Because the tube connections were > essentially the same, you could install an > option 004 high performance tube in the 5060A and get better performance out > of your old unit. This was done on a > number of them and you had to do some modifications to get them to work > correctly...ie the degauss coil connections. > It wasn't a simple "drop in" the first time. You could of course install the > tube and not the degauss but you would be > losing some of your performance enhancements if you did. At quite a cost > increase too. > One thing you would want to be cautious of if you find the tube is indeed > dead. The early tubes used an AC heater > circuit that produced an audible whine. The later tubes were designed for a > DC heater circuit and required a completely > different heater module. I > don't believe one was ever made for the 5060A. HP would not even warranty a > DC tube that > got installed into a unit with an AC heater circuit. This was > true whether it was a high performance tube or not. I don't > know if it was a serious problem or if HP was just covering their bases in > case the unit wouldn't quite meet all of it's > specs with the DC tube. > I have a number of the older manuals but do not have the means to do a pdf > scan on them to make them available to > the rest of the group. I have the 5060A, 5061A, 5061B, 5062C, and the 5065A > rubidium. Unfortunately, I haven't had > the time to make any copies of them, > much less scan them since it takes about 2 hours each. Unfortunately, the > machines > do not like the pages that have been hole punched so you have to > feed them in by hand. There were many versions of > some of these manuals so you want to find one that is as close to your serial > numbers prefix, (without being below the > number) as you can. > > Chuck Norton > Frequency Standards & Services ___________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Mail réinvente le mail ! Découvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail et son interface révolutionnaire. http://fr.mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
