This basic counter came with a lot of equipment I purchased some time ago. I didn’t need another counter but I wasn’t going to complain of getting another piece of test equipment.
Anyway, when I turned it on it didn’t count anything.
The real counter is the upper unit (5300A) while the lower unit is the signal conditioning unit. The two units easily snap together (like the Model 3470 Measurement System) and so it is really easy to disassemble.
I took a look at the pcbs but there was nothing that seemed to be broken/burnt/missing.
I expected that it would have been fun to poke around the counter but it wasn’t meant to be as inside there is a slider switch with two positions: INT and EXT. On the EXT position, the counter expects a timebase on its read BNC connector while on the INT position we get the internal timebase on the BNC connector.
As you can guess, it was on the EXT position while it should have been on the INT position.
That’s it.
A.Cicuta
