I'm still waiting for the day some weird niche, Rohde & Schwarz equipment I saw once and thought "that'd be cool to have" pops up on ebay.

Unfortunately their stuff in ebay is still pretty expensive secondhand, unless it's something hardly anyone except hardcore hobbyists would want, like television demodulators.

I do have some old Keysight stuff (well, most of it is HP and Agilent which ofc birthed Keysight) most of it was still several hundred dollars a price, mostly mid-80s-90s telecom equipment.

Old HP / Agilent / Keysight (aka HPAK) stuff does show up on Ebay for decent prices from time to time, so long as you don't need the specs of the latest and newest gear. And hobbyists usually don't. Personally all of the "purchased new" test equipment in my home lab is Rigol, and almost all of the "purchased used" is HPAK. It makes a nice balance.

Now to score one of those HP 3458A's one of these days...

This is unlikely because most new-ish equipment will be traded in or is leased outright, and will go to the crusher instead of being sold on the used market. Manufacturers obviously don't want a large used market.

Sorry for the horrible link, but this one seems to be an older generation of a similar device.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/255302112122?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DI...

Huh, 20-up-to-80GHz for $165. Oookayyyy. Riight then.

(NB, the only critical bit an eBay link is the item ID, ie (/itm/[0-9]+).)

Not sure if you just made a typo there, but that's 20GHz, up to 80GSa/s (GigaSamples per second).

Thanks. TIL I really shouldn't be commenting on things I don't properly understand and not reading listing titles properly... right.

Stays extra far away from heavy machinery for today

165K!

Facepalm D:. I don't know how I managed to leave that off. Still not used to the extra fiddliness of typing on a phone keyboard :(

No problem :) Anyway, the point was that you can find the weirdest stuff on ebay, even ridiculously high end stuff from a couple of years ago. And of course $165K is still a fairly large chunk of cash for a second hand scope (to put it mildly) but it's about 10% of what it originally sold for.

Thanks. A random question this makes me think of: I've had "get an oscilloscope" on the one-day queue for quite a while, and I might be looking at actually being able to get one at last. For someone trying to balance a) understanding how not to blow it up, b) understanding how not to blow up what I'm poking at, and c) wrangling the newfound ability to MeAsUrE eVeRyThInG ("forget sleep, what does *that* trace do????")... I'm ultimately going to prefer (the confidence boost of) starting with a scope cheap enough to blow up instead of nuking my {computer, phone, AC outlet, USB charger, ebike charge circuit, FPGA devkit, ...} - but at the same time I'll definitely want to play with LVDS, MIPI, low-rate serdes stuff too, etc. All while I have exactly zero formal understanding of the basics >:D (hence the "blow up the scope first" bit...).

I guess I wonder if there's a reconcilable Venn diagram of viability somewhere in there, and if there is, what it might look like. (I think I'm looking at the oscilloscope as a C compiler, and electronics as Spicy Assembly xD)

While that is true, equivalent time sampling oscilloscopes with high bandwidth optical heads from the 90-00s still sell for 5 figures on ebay, so arguably still out of typical hobbyist ranges.