[time-nuts] Off the wall: anyone with experience programmingHP3456A?

John Ackermann N8UR jra at febo.com
Sat Sep 10 10:10:02 EDT 2005


Tom Van Baak wrote:
>>SRQ is definitely a pain, but is hard to do without if you're doing
>>anything with multiple instruments on the bus; my current problem is
>>trying to read frequency from a 5370A and voltage from the 3456A to plot
>>VCO performance.  Without the SRQ, I'm getting missing voltmeter readings.
> 
> 
> Does it work, in a loop, to send 3456A commands
> to read voltage, get the response, and then 5370A
> commands to read frequency, and get a response?
> 
> /tvb

Yes, but I've been getting occasional squirrely values from the 3456A in
that mode, possibly because of a timeout and without using the bus
signals there's no way to check whether the instrument has actually
completed.  There are code workarounds to that, but I was hoping to use
the "data ready" bit to validate the reading.

But I think I may have found the problem -- I just ran through the
internal test set, and I'm getting a failure on the RAM test.  That
probably explains the SRQ failure, and may even explain why every so
often a reading isn't in the right format.  Now I just need to find a
couple of ancient 4118 RAM chips.

John




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