[time-nuts] My HP5370A performance

Pete peterawson at earthlink.net
Fri Jun 19 19:26:41 UTC 2009


Rex,

Your 5370A is performing well. While it's possible to use the 
adjustment procedure to gain a few ps better readings, the
result is largely an illusion & won't produce better results with 
real world signals. 

If you choose to wander into the adjustment procedures, be
sure to have the required test equipment at hand. Correctly
adjusting the 5370A is NOT an exercise to take lightly & 
can result in poorer results than your unit is displaying. The
other caution about this box is the adjustments are often
interactive & may require many iterations to get right.

As for stable readings in the last 2 or 3 digits, if you compute
the influence of the specified 300uV of input referred noise, 
you'll see that the variations you're observing are probably
smaller than the noise voltage suggests. All this would be
easier to deal with if the data output capability of this box
was simple, but it's not & that's too bad. Despite these
issues, the 5370A/B is still the highest time resolution 
counter from H-P/Agilent.

Pete Rawson



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