[time-nuts] Instrument BASIC

Gerhard Hoffmann dk4xp at arcor.de
Thu Mar 3 00:57:37 EST 2016


Am 02.03.2016 um 19:04 schrieb John C. Westmoreland, P.E.:
> Magnus,
>
> This was the best answer I got so far - I am sure this isn't what you're
> looking for:
>
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-89441A-Vector-Signal-Analyzer-Opt-1C2-AY9-UFG-AY7-AYA-/252278222960?hash=item3abcf43070:g:uRMAAOxyNo9SojsE
>
> I have one more person that I am waiting for an answer/suggestion from - I
> am not sure if there are any 3rd parties out there supporting this other
> than what you might find on eBay.
>
> Interesting aside is some of these are selling for more than they were
> being let go for after the first dot-com-bomb.
>
The market for these was quite small, mostly cell phone developpers,
and they have made the jump to LTE already a long time ago. The 89441A 
is not
good enough for LTE, so they probably have discarded their surplus stuff
long ago. Mine was pre-owned by Motorola I was told.

Dynamic range  < 10Hz is severely degraded by 1/f noise. It took me
60 to 80 dB preamp gain for my noise measurements to hide that.
Then there is not much dynamic range left over.

It was easy to put on the network with a €25 BNC to Western plug
adapter from Amazon. But you still need both BNC terminations even
if there is no real Ethernet coax cable. Works much better.

Controlling is as easy as opening port 5000-something on 192.168.1.123
and and dumping GPIB commands. I have done a program to do FFT
analysis over 7 decades (Linux, gcc, gnuplot...). Source is available.
Ooohps, I'm not supposed to think about that ;-)

regards, Gerhard


I really like that 89441A!




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