I'm looking into the possibility of suing the seller of my "2465B" for fraud. He is a well-known seller on ebay, based in California, with over 1600 feedback.
2 years ago, I bought a calibrated "2465B" from him, and paid $1270 + shipping.
He claimed it had 270 hours, like new, serial number in the 60,000 range.

During the last 2 years, I had to repair the PSU, and the A1 PCB, which seemed weird for such a low-time unit.

Recently I tried to measure a signal in the 400MHz range. The signal was not acceptable. I wrote privately to 2 knowledgeable members of this forum (one a previous Tek employee) for their opinions.

One of them picked up on the fact that my A1 PCB was not a 2465B unit, but a 2445B unit.

I wrote the seller, asking him to comment.
At this point, I'm not disclosing his name - I may do that later.

Here is his reply:

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"Tek made 2445B and 2465B with only one internal difference: a 2445B has a bandwidth choke on the backside of its main A1 board etched into the printed circuitry of the bare board. This was also true of the 2445A 2465A pair, and the original 2445 2465 pair introduced in 1983.

For the privilege of not having that bandpass limiter, Tek charged clients $2000 more, but was too lazy to make 2 really different scopes. So since 1985, when I discovered Tek's laziness, I have earned my living upgrading the 3rd digit from 4 to 6.

The 2445B A1 board, once it has its bandwidth choke bypassed (I cut traces in 4 places on the back and spliced in 2 short straight wires to carry the signals from the DL100 delay line to the inputs of U600), can do 400MHz.

The only other difference is to ground a contact (pin 23 J511) that tells the A5 processor board that it is now has a 6 instead of a 4 (as 3rd digit) that allows the 5nS/cm fastest sweep speed to be accessible, instead of just going upto 10nS/cm.

This is what many of my 2465B clients have.....

You can transfuse chimpanzee blood (of the correct A, B, AB, or O type) into a human. If you receive this blood, it does not make you a chimpanzee. So, I am not going to feel guilty over what I have done for 25 years. I have unleashed the slower half of the 2400 population to do what it was designed to do.

Companies (or even wasteful governmental agencies) do not buy expensive new scopes to keep them in storage for 20 years so that they can later sell them to me for nothing. What I find ranges from (sorry to use the human analogy again) from refugees from Auschwitz to the luxury hotel crowd... Some are intact, some are missing body parts. Some have been dropped, others have been canibalized for parts, others have had repairs attempted where none were needed. Some have been put back together, some have been left open.

I take all this pile of immigrants coming to me, and do the best I can with it. I transplant whatever I need to to make what I want come out the way I want.

If a 6 hours scope landed in my laps but had the case & handle bent due to a drop, do you think I am going to bother to disclose that the replacement case & handle came from a scope with 60000 hours. Do you think this 6 hours scope lands in my laps because, the original owner forgot to use it, or is it because he had a accident with it 6 hours after starting?

So he may have broken a few things in it... Where will I find 6 hours old parts to replace? Nowhere! A few parts will have more hours, and that's just the way it has to be.

There is not going to be a disclosure the outer case was bent, the fan was cracked... Once it works, passes cal, I sell it as a 6 hours scope.

This is not an airplane where its accident record is kept and disclosed to future owners. Even with an airplane, the future passengers will not be told that once the plane landed hard enough to crack a landing gear.

I don't remember 2 years later what was the exact story of your scope and who or how many its contributors were. But I do know all of it was shiny enough to pass for the 297 hours the A5 board's clock indicated. I do know it passed cal, including 400MHz bandwidth. Now it is true that perhaps with a 2465B A1 main board it might have even done 520MHz, but I figured a good U800 and 400MHz was more important than 500MHz and no horiz deflection after 5 minutes' warmup.

By the way, there is no bandpass difference between the 300MHz 2465, 350MHz 2465A, and 400MHz 2465B.... They all use the same parts to carry the signal from BNC to CRT deflection plates. If Tek marketing can come up with these imagined bandpass improvements over the years, I have no problem with how I free up bandpass.

On the subject of disclosures, there are many left out, not just passengers not being told of an airplane's accident history when they buy a ticket or board that plane. US soldiers who went to Iraq or Afghanistan as volunteers, were not told they'd be retained for duty far longer than the 2 years they volunteered for.

My high speed internet is definitely no as fast as it claims to be. My 3G mobile does not work as fast and reliably as it claimed. My Volvo does not put out as many horsepower as it advertized, nor does it get the fuel economy it claimed. Will it offer the better accident protection it claims - I am not going to test it just to find out.

Can I get a refund 2 years later? NO ! "

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Notice his rationalizations.....

He claims that there are only 2 differences between the 2445B and 2465B A1 PCB's, rationalizing that because he's taken care of them, the 2445B A1 PCB is functionally equivalent to a 2465B A1 PCB, and therefore justifies his assertion that he does not have to disclose to his clients that they are buying a souped up 200MHz machine running at 400MHz.

There is in fact a 3rd difference (there are probably more) which he fails to mention - inductor L403 (installed on the 2465B PCB, but not on the 2445B PCB), which is critical for the high-frequency functioning from 400MHz up to 550MHz.

So he basically is modding a 2445B PCB, and claiming calibration to 400MHz, and reselling them as 2465B's. No disclosure.

This is my reply:

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"Your comment on transplants made me laugh. We're not talking about swapping a handle or knob, or a finger, for heaven's sake, we're talking about the main PCB or brain, which determines the operating characteristics and limitations and capabilities.
You made a 200MHz-spec unit operate at 400MHz, at the very limit of it's capabilities. Big deal.
The 2465B, is leisurely strolling at 400MHz, and its limitations start at 550MHz - right from an Oregon Tek engineer.

You can argue those points as much as you like, but the bottom line is that your arguments will never hold water, like the Tek engineer's will. Simple point - he worked at Tek, and you didn't. So your opinion doesn't count. But that's besides the point.

BTW, the Tek engineer was not impressed with what you'd done. He said that there's danger to the mid-layer traces inside the PCB.

He thought he knew you when you were apparently operating out of Canada, but I don't know that far back.

There is no way you can justify what you've done, no matter how you want to look at it or rationalize it. I can tell you that from an Israeli legal viewpoint, you'd be toast. And I'll bet that California's law is even stricter regarding misrepresentation."

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So here we are, 2 years after the fact, and I have the same modded 2445B scope that 1600+ others of his customers have, instead of the real honest-to-goodness 2465B which we thought we were buying.

What do you other members think of this?

Menahem
http://www.condoraudio.com