[volt-nuts] 3458A Questions - The Sequel

[J. L. Trantham]

-----Original Message-----
From: volt-nuts-bounces at febo.com [mailto:volt-nuts-bounces at febo.com] On
Behalf Of Charles Black
Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 3:21 PM
To: Discussion of precise voltage measurement
Subject: Re: [volt-nuts] 3458A Questions - The Sequel

Hi Joe,

The RS-232 bus is easy cheap and reliable but too slow for the 3458a.  
The 3458A can send a lot of data over the bus very quickly so at the 
time the IEEE bus  was an easy choice.

I bought the IEEE-488 PCI card on eeBay and also a long long cable. 
Later I decided to spring for a GPIB-ENET/100 for $200 to free up the 
single PCI slot in my PC and to be able to be further away with out the 
long IEEE-488 cable. Both were National products and worked well once 
the manual was thoroughly read.

I use National Instruments National Instruments Measurement and 
Instrumentation Explorer which is a free download from NI which is part 
of the NI VISA install. It can see your IEEE-488 devices and let you 
send text commands to them. It also has the Spy program that lets you 
monitor the actual text sent and received in real time. Just remember to 
alter the ID command test from the *IDN? to ID?. Also "BEEP" works. Case 
doesn't matter. You will get a communication error if you don't set 
"END" to ALWAYS in the 3458a menu.

Charlie,

I got out my NI GPIB-USB-HS connector, loaded my NI 488.2 on my XP laptop,
and now have been able to communicate with the meter.  Thanks very much for
the tip of setting 'END' to 'ALWAYS'.  Until I did that, nothing!

Next, I would like to read the contents of the EPROM and read the
calibration settings.  So far, I have not been able to solve that.

When I send or 'query' or 'read' 'CALRAM?', all I get back is the current
reading on the meter as it measures my Fluke 731B.

More work to do.

Joe