KO4BB's Manuals Page, Information

As eBay has become a significant marketplace for used test equipment, it has become possible for many of us to acquire at very low cost (compared to the price new) test equipment that we could have only dreamed of owning only a few years ago. Most 20 year old Tektronix and HP/Agilent test equipment sells for not more and sometimes much less than 10% of the price new.

Unfortunately, with the low price comes the more frequent failures, and some of the equipment can only be purchased economically (on a hobby budget) when broken, so the need to maintain this equipment has risen.

That's where the value of older test equipment shines:

1. This type of equipment seldom uses custom components, or when custom conponents are used, they perform relatively simple functions, allowing troubleshooting down to the component level.
2. Most of them were designed before surface mount became so widespread and therefore are relatively easily repairable in a hobby shop or ham shack.
3. With this equipment, the manufacturers generated very well done Maintenance (or Service) manuals which can be used to repair or simply to understand how this equipment works.

I also added a number of ham radio manuals because hams are usually technically minded tinkerers who will want to repair something even if it's not broke (not that I have ever done it :-)

So here we go, all the manuals on this site are free to download. Your only obligation is to make sure that if you come across a manual for Tek, HP, Fluke or other type of test or ham radio related equipment in electronic format I do not have, you must use the Upload button so that we can all share it :-)

Thank you for visiting,
Didier KO4BB

Technical Notes

The scripts simply create links to the actual documents that are in the normal directory structure of my web site: http://www.ko4bb.com/Manuals

The download of manuals is done directly using the http file transfer protocol and is not handled by the scripts, which makes the operation fast and efficient. Since I do not use lots of big graphics, searching through the directory structure is fast, even on modest bandwidth connections.

The Search tool does not scan the Manuals directory in real time, as that would be way too slow. The search works with an index of all the files. When I update the site, another tool generates an index which is used for subsequent searches. The only gotcha is for me to make sure that I update the index when I upload new files.

Regardless of how tempting it might be to link directly to particular files in the Manuals directory, I recommend against doing so because I often move things around and rename files and folders to make it easier to navigate and explore the site, so the file you linked to may move, rendering the link useless. If you want to point someone to a particular manual or file, tell then what to search for. It is very easy to use the Search tool at the top of the Manuals directory page to find what you are looking for.

When new files are uploaded using the Upload button on the Manuals page, they are initially stored in a temporary directory and are not immediately accessible for download. You can verify that the file(s) was(were) uploaded by checking the Recent Upload directory. This page is different from others in that the file names do not contain actual links to the files. Also, files in the Upload area are not scanned by the Search tool. It usually takes a day or so for me to check the files and move them to the normal Manuals page for that equipment.

If you would like to setup a similar tool on your site, let me know and I'll be glad to help you get set up.