Fixing my Lithuanian oscilloscope

I visited Riga, Latvia with a youth group which we as a family were involved with in 1992, and there I stumbled upon a Soviet oscilloscope in a department store. It was from the neighboring country, Lithuania, and was manufactured in Vilnius, the capital. The markings say what I guess means "Made in the Soviet Union". At least it says CCCP in the upper right-hand corner. I remember these letters very well as all Soviet athletes used to have them on their backs.

The oscilloscope came with full documentation, even with a bilingual manual. I had grown fond of this oscilloscope as it was lightweight and simple to use once I had learned what the Russian markings meant. It is a typical instrument for TV-repair with a 7 MHz bandwidth.

Now after 20 years, I was therefore very sad when it malfunctioned. This was the time to test if the manual was helpful or not. The symptom was that the beam no longer could span the whole screen in the X-direction. Even with the Horizontal positioning all the way to the left one could barely see the beam.

I opened the bilingual manual only to discover that the two languages were Russian and Lithuanian!

Vintage Tektronix oscilloscopes

I first encountered this generation of Tektronix oscilloscopes in my first job at the Electronics Lab of SINTEF, Trondheim, Norway in 1978. Already at that time the main use for them was as heaters in the offices. That is, only if you wanted to work in the break between Christmas and New Year when the central heating was turned down.

Since then I have come across the two oscilloscopes shown here, and the collector (or is it hoarder?) in me has not been able to say no to them. They are really advanced for their time: regulated power supplies with tubes, ceramic stand-offs and lots and lots of tubes.

The  oscilloscopes are 541A and 543, from 1959 and 1964 respectively, it seems. The plug-in units are 1A1, L, M, and 53/54K plus the cart. The 1A1 actually seems even to have FET-transistors, not only tubes like the others. The units work, but how well they work I am not sure about as they have been in storage for the last 5-10 years.