Late 70’s Hitachi V-1065 Internals In Full Glory: Built Like a Tank (Beware the X-RAYS!)

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**Warning** DO NOT take apart hardware that you either don’t know anything about or you know deals in high voltages (see BIG stickers over screws), such as a microwave. Never put your safety as risk and this is not meant to be a guide of any sort in repairing this unit. I only have pictures to offer, at least someone could see if their unit had stock parts through what is shown below.

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So I decided to finally take a peak into the Hitachi V-1065 100 MHz Oscilloscope (late 70’s to early 80’s technology), little bit of digital memory/recall. Huge cathode ray tube setup relying on a huge electron tube shown below.  Literally half this unit is dedicated to the space needed for the CRT. Good thing monitors in the late 90’s figured out how to improve greatly on this starting point and eventually ditched the huge high voltage electron tube!

Model number and brand shown w/ CRT still visible.

Is the spool of wire at the rear of the unit a way to create a lot of inductance or what? I am unclear on this part right now (at the end of the CRT)

Flip side of the CRT and we have RADIATION warnings!!

More surprising to me than the cathode ray tube and it’s associated hardware was how Hitachi decided to mount their ALPS potentiometer, literally it is 11″ from the knob on the front panel and they had to use extensions to bridge the gap. I assume this was all about max distance from the CRT for the digital circuitry, especially the IC dedicated for measurement/computation.

Here you can see what appears to be two higher end ALPS potentiometers, two different styles. Potentiometers will give you an absolute position within a limited range of motion. Now an Encoder (sometimes we see this confused) is usually seen when we are changing inputs, although there are many ways to accomplish this task, including completely digital circuitry and relays combined with a potentiometer + electric motor (remote volume control) and some sort of IR or RF receiver/transceiver.

I think I put the tape measure at the furthest away of all the potentiometers and/or encoders and you can see, this is around a foot long extension for the furthest component mounting location. I’d be interested to hear anyone who has more experience with older model oscilloscopes and could enlighten us on why they did some things the way they did. I can only give you educated guesses on most things, except if we are talking about modding hardware. If I am modding any hardware I have already read the white paper on the device (if possible) and know everything about what the mod does and how. This is more of a peaky-boo with an oscilloscope that probably hasn’t been exposed to the elements in 30 years.

If you noticed that 250V .22uF coupling or decoupling capacitor, here is a better image of it.

This was the first oscilloscope I purchased and I plan on keeping it for a long time as analog CRT is preferable when working with audio equipment, unless your budget is above $200 for a used oscilloscope, the Digilent Analog Discovery2 is a good device, I own it. Definitely check it out for an affordable be all solution.

I finally realized, this is the base of an electron tube. A really really big tube, biggest I have ever dealt with. Dangerous voltage levels here

All caps looked great, I was surprised not to find something bulging by now.

Nice internal shot of the V-1065