Hello fellow solder slingers. A piece of Tektronix history is about to be revealed. A bonus of living in beautiful Oregon is the proximity to the original Tektronix factory. Many of the thousands of people that worked at Tek over the years retired in the area and sometimes have very interesting things in their attics and garages. I came across an estate seller that had cleared out the garage of the widow of a Tek engineer. In among the boxes of TM500 modules was an engineering prototype of a product I'd never seen, labeled FG 506. Doing some on line research somehow turned up the designer of the module who had written an article about the design concept in a tech paper, turns out he is now living in South America. He was quite surprised when I contacted him that there was one of these still in the wild, as he thought he had the only surviving unit (#6). The story is that marketing felt it would possibly cut into existing sales of the FG 504, so development was halted and never went into production after the 6 engineering samples were built. For the Tek collectors here, did you ever wonder why they skipped over the FG 506 model number in the function generator line? Now you know. The thing that the FG 506 can do better is testing audio amplifiers, with a logarithmic sweep over 3 decades with the push of one button. A handy feature none of the other Tek function generators can do. Duplicating this function with modern test equipment is possible, but only with very high end gear. You will see this demonstrated in an upcoming video from the Zenwizard on Youtube. I sent it to him to feature on his TM 500 series videos, and he has been working with the designer to present the unit and its unique design with technical clarity and accuracy. I have seen the video edits in progress, Zen is doing a great job with it.
The designer is interesting in possibly revising it with modern components, and asked me about marketing it to a new generation. My feeling as a component level electronics repair shop owner is the number of people servicing audio gear is quite low as a target audience. I struggle to find competent help, there are just not that many techs out there working in busy shops. Most consumer electronics go into the landfills, not into the repair shop for a renewed life. Sadly this isn't going to change anytime soon, keeping the number of available job opening very small. I think putting out a modern version of this thing would be a labor of love, not a profitable venture. I'd like to be wrong about that, but how many of you doing this kind of work regularly invest in new test gear for your shop?
The designer is interesting in possibly revising it with modern components, and asked me about marketing it to a new generation. My feeling as a component level electronics repair shop owner is the number of people servicing audio gear is quite low as a target audience. I struggle to find competent help, there are just not that many techs out there working in busy shops. Most consumer electronics go into the landfills, not into the repair shop for a renewed life. Sadly this isn't going to change anytime soon, keeping the number of available job opening very small. I think putting out a modern version of this thing would be a labor of love, not a profitable venture. I'd like to be wrong about that, but how many of you doing this kind of work regularly invest in new test gear for your shop?
