About a month ago, I managed to score an HP 8444A Tracking generator to go with my HP spectrum analyzers. A TG is a fantastic tool to sweep filters and circuits to get a feel for the response curves of said circuits.<\/p>\n
The 8444A was initially built to go with earlier generation of SA than the 8558 and 8565 SAs that I have. In order to work with newer SAs that don’t have a 3rd LO output you either need an 8444A with option 59 or you need to feed it with 500Mhz from a frequency generator.<\/p>\n
I’ve been using mine with 500mhz coming from an 8640B @ 0 dBm. Somewhere in the last 20 hours I know I managed to bump that up to 20 dBm for at least a few sec. This may or may not be related to my current problem.<\/p>\n
The display used to be a nice relatively flat sweep from 0 up through ~1.4Ghz, where it rolled off to zero.<\/p>\n
Late last night, I saw the curve had a lot of ripple\/noise in it and a notch in it at about 74Mhz. What have I done!?!<\/p>\n
So tonight I’ll break out the 8558 spectrum analyzer and see if the artifact is a product of the 8444A or of the 8565A.<\/p>\n
Update: 4\/25\/11<\/p>\n
Nope, it wasn’t blown up. Thanks to the folks on the hp-agilent-test-equipment mailing list, I traced the problem down to a bad cable.<\/p>\n
In the process, I learned a great deal and made some good progress on the 500mhz oscillator, option 059 replacement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
About a month ago, I managed to score an HP 8444A Tracking generator to go with my HP spectrum analyzers. A TG is a fantastic tool to sweep filters and circuits to get a feel for the response curves of said circuits. The 8444A was initially built to go with earlier generation of SA than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58,"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.correctivephrenology.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}