All posts tagged Racal

Racal-Dana 1999 Teardown, Repair and Calibration

By gerrysweeney on 25 Comments

I have been using this Racal-Dana 1999 counter for a long time and in the last few months it started to suffer from an intermittent fault where it would appear to freeze and stop responding. Banging the unit on the side with the palm of my hand would get it going again, and when doing this it would often restart as if its been powered on. In addition to this fault, the counter suffers from an altogether common problem with the buttons on the front which loose any tactile feel to them and become difficult to actuate – this is a common problem on these counters and thats down to the poorly designed switches Racal used for its frequency counter range.

I identify the fault and fix the problem and I replace all the buttons with ones that work and end up with a fully restored frequency counter once again.

I have made the manual including schematics available in the attachments section of this article for your convenience

See you next time….

I Need 10MHz – how hard can it be!

By gerrysweeney on 37 Comments

It all started when I wanted to calibrate my HP 53131A universal counter, which as it turns out probably has one of the crappiest and most disappointing standard oscillators ever put into a frequency counter, HP you should bow your head in shame….oh of course I forgot, a half reasonable oscillator is an “optional extra” when you by HP/Agilent – of course it is….anyway, on with the job at hand

If you have or want to play with an FE-5680A Rubidium Frequency Standard or an OSCILLOQUARTZ OCXO 8663-XS or a HP 53131A Counter or a Racal Dana 1999 counter or similar then this video will most likely be of interest 🙂 what I am trying to get is a predicable and reliable frequency and standard for my home lab.

I guess I will let the video do the talking on this one….

Here are a whole bunch of useful links that relate to this video (there are many more too if you search around the web)

Thanks to all of the authors and content creators for the above information. Thanks for watching.