Alan Wolke is a senior field applications engineer serving customers in the northeastern corner of the U.S., focusing primarily on RF and high speed analog and mixed signal applications. He earned his BSEE in 1985 from NJIT and spent the majority of his career involved in various analog circuit design, test and application engineering roles before joining Tektronix in 2006. In his spare time, he is an active ham radio enthusiast (W2AEW) and enjoys tinkering in his home lab designing and building circuits, as well as debugging, repairing and restoring electronic equipment. You can check out Alan’s entry-level electronics and ham radio videos on his YouTube channel.

Test Equipment Good Enough to Eat!

Wed, 2012-12-19 11:41 — Alan

As hard as it is for me to believe, I turned 50 years old this year. What, how did THAT happen?!?! My wonderful wife planned a very special surprise party for me. She knows, just as most of my friends and family know, how passionate I am about my job and the test & measurement equipment that I support, use and play with. With that in mind, she had some awesome desserts custom made for the party!

This picture shows my Tektronix RSA6114A birthday cake. While smaller than the actual piece of equipment, it seemed like it almost weighed as much! The attention to detail was incredible – from the perfect screen image and product label, to the hand-made and hand-painted buttons and knobs. It even included the side handles and a power cord!

I asked two of my nieces to help me blow out the candles!

This is the last picture before we all shared this delicious piece of test equipment.

As if the RSA cake wasn’t enough, my brilliant wife had custom cookies made as party favors for everyone to take home with them. Keeping with my T&M passion, the cookies were made to resemble a Fluke DMM!

As a final birthday wish – I hope that everyone reading is as lucky as I am to have a job doing what they are passionate about, and the love and support of family in friends in their lives.

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Old Tektronix equipment

Mon, 2012-12-24 10:08 — dgrindel@stny.rr.com

Alan do you know of anyone that might want a couple of old Tektronix oscilloscopes ? I have a old sampling scope and a 315 D . Maybe someone that has a museum of Tek scopes ! Thanks, Dave