Racal-Dana made great gear. I have a Racal-Dana 9906 Universal Timer Counter, which I bought from Ebay last year. It was stinking of cigarette smoke but worked fairly well. Did a complete refurbishment on it - tore it down, cleaned it, repainted it, took the 36-year old reference oscillator out of it and installed a new TCXO. Works fantastically well now I've calibrated it against a GPS-locked "Leo Bodnar" brand 10MHz clock. Then I discovered that some of the internal logic that provides the Racal's data output port functionality (rear panel connector) was damaged - most likely due to overheating for years. Swapped out all the 74' series logic in that area, installed a small case fan to get a more uniform internal temperature, and now it's back to factory spec, or possibly a bit better! Made a small microcontroller-based translator for the rear-panel data output feature - so now I can use my PC to log the data coming from the Racal over RS-232.
Excellent! It's always nice to be able to rehab this older gear, especially stuff from this era where - yeah, it's from 1985, but it's still able to take measurements that are very beneficial today, and thankfully Racal-Dana seems to be one of the better manufacturers, providing component-level troubleshooting information along with schematics and parts lists.
