GW Instek GOS-6030 Reverse Engineered Service Manual
Introduction
A few years ago the opportunity came along to purchase a number of GW-Instek GOS-6000 series
oscilloscopes, all with faults/damage. A deal was then agreed, and for better or worse I became the
owner of 16 6XXX oscilloscopes of varying specifications.
The collection was then stored in my shed for a number of months until time/weather/incentive all
peaked. The first step, find a set of manuals. Therein lay the first problem, as it would seem that
service information for all GW equipment is as rare as the proverbial RHS. Further investigation
confirmed that the manufacturer only supplies service documentation to dealers, or selected
service agents. Not good at all. After sending a few emails using the GW online enquiry service, with
no reply, the full horror of the situation dawned upon me, the scopes would need fixing without
reference to service documentation. Subsequent attempts to obtain spare parts also failed dismally.
It seems that ALL repairs should be through authorised dealers, and long gone are the days where
test equipment came with a full service manual from new, along with easy access to spares.
To cut a long story short, after fixing a couple of the scopes, and sketching out a number of partial
schematics as I traced each fault, I decided to combine all of the schematic portions into a proper
circuit diagram for much of the entire scope. At present it focusses on the 6030, however the other
models with higher bandwidth use essentially the same circuits, but with small changes in
transistor, CRT, and various component value changes. At some point I hope to group all variations
in this document.
In the end this took about 3 months of spare time, on and off to complete whilst still looking into
other faults. The end result comprises this document. The schematics are a mixture of sections
drawn from scratch, and others edited by cut and paste in ‘Paint’, from other oscilloscope
schematics. Because the circuit diagrams have evolved over time, they do not ‘flow’ in a logical way.
They are what they are, a group of interconnected blocks, which can make them tricky to
understand when deciding what the circuits are doing. The limited amount of on-line service
information for GW products was used as a basis for the ‘cut and paste’ stuff, as some circuitry from
the GOS- 600, GOS-61XX and GOS-62XX series ‘scopes is similar in a lot of cases. There are also
strong similarities to some Isotech and Tenma circuits, plus I feel sure other re-branded ‘scopes will
show a common parentage. Should anyone find errors, or have additional scraps of circuits from
this or other GW ‘scopes, please leave details on this forum.
I must stress that this is still work in progress, is far from complete, and most likely contains errors.
So please use with the above limitations in mind.
In the end, I hope it is better than nothing!