I have never actually learned how to use one of these properly, I've just "used" them a few times before. A few years ago I bought an old one at an auction (Tektronix 422). Could have been made in 1969. I've really just played around with it, not really set it up to take accurate measurements or even have a proper set of probes.
It came with its original 10X probe, but now I have a few more. I got another one to compare whether I like using that.
Some probes aren't very expensive, but maybe you get what you pay for, so I'll see how it goes.
First thing to do was to get a copy of the manual. On an old gadget like a 60's o'scope like this, you would think that's hard to do. Nope. Lots of faithful followers of Tektronix gear are dedicated enough to publish wiki pages and keep libraries of the old manuals; maintenance and test manuals too (even the manuals for setting up the crazy super-isolated power supplies that o'scopes need.)
Next to figure out the scaling and the triggering. That was something I kind of picked up as "obvious" before, but I definitely did NOT know about the scaling built into the probes, and the meaning of all that stuff. Today I spent most of my time sifting through what I need to know about probes (especially since I have a variety of new ones).
Eventually I found the reference signal port for the calibration square wave. Once I learned how to set it up and adjust the probe to flatten the peak of the square wave I got my first idea of what this variety of probes is like. The old Tek 10X that came with this unit was fine, but in learning what the settings meant I wildly cranked the adjustment screw around anyway. Just to see what would happen. The other new probes were fine; very slight tweaks. Still getting used to what I'm doing, so I had already put away the new probe with the 1x/10x switch when I realized that I had only calibrated it on the 1x setting not 10x and got curious how that would affect the compensation.
Next I think I'll go slap a 555 onto a breadboard to make a few signals to be measured.
