[time-nuts] HP-53132A Faded and flickering display

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Wed Nov 14 09:05:21 UTC 2012


Dear Edgardo,

On 14/11/12 04:37, Edgardo Molina wrote:
> Dear Azelio, Tom, John and Luciano ( I hope I am not missing anybody),
>
> Thank you all of you for your kind advise on this subject. I am sorry I was unable to reply in a timely manner. I had to leave town for a week for new IT business. I think I will start by dismantling the unit display and test the tantalum capacitors as you mentioned. If I can achieve success by doing this it is fine. Otherwise I could consider using it as the GPIB workhorse as I just started to obtain my first ADEV, MDEV and TDEV graphs with TimeLab and a Prologix adapter. May I know the command for turning the display off via the GPIB port? That is something nice for long periods of sampling.
>
> A whole new world has just opened to me. Know I am starting to get intimate with my frequency standards by knowing them in deep. If all goes well I should start updating my wish list for a Wavecrest DTS unit next year. For now I will squeeze every single Tau value from the graphs using the 53132A.
>
> Last but not least. If the display fades away I could eventually consider buying a new one as the whole instrument is in pristine condition and would be a shame to see it working without a brilliant display.
> Thank you for all your feedback.
>
> Wishing you all a pleasant evening/morning.

It seems like you need to do what I did, go to the agilent site and 
download the manuals. Operations and Programming manuals is easy, there 
is then a service manual and component-level manual.

The programming manual should assist you on turning of the screen.

The component level manual does not detail the power-supplies.

Did anyone here analyse the analogue interpolators of the 53131/53132? 
It's a relative simple design being used with a single transistor and 
charging a cap and then read from an ADC. The ADC reference voltages can 
be calibrated from a DAC. Notice that there exists two versions of the 
main board, for each of the models and that they have different 
schematics set in the same manual.

Cheers,
Magnus



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