TNP #31 - HP 87421 & 83017A 26.5GHz Microwave System Amplifier Teardown, Repair & Experiments
15.2K views
April 9, 2023 9:58 PM
In this episode Shahriar repairs an HP 87421 power supply in order to revive a HP 83017A 0.5-26.6GHz Microwave System Amplifier. The power supply has multiple bad capacitors which can be readily exchanged. An X-ray of a bad versus good capacitor is also shown. A custom cable must be made and the pinouts of each module should be revers engineered.
The amplifier successful powers on and various performance metrics are measured. S-parameters, noise figure, PSAT, OIP3 and detector are all measured and verified. The instrument used are the Keysight FieldFox, Junkosha RF cables, R&S NRP power sensor, R&S SMB RF Vector Generator and R&S ZNL20 real-time spectrum analyzer / network analyzer hybrid.
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TNP #30 - Agilent 4349B 4-Channel High Resistance Meter Teardown, Repair & Experiments
16.9K views
April 2, 2023 9:28 AM
In this episode Shahriar “repairs” an HP/Agilent 4349B 4-channel high-resistance meter capable of measuring up to 10^15 Ohms! The instrument has four independent channels and requires an external power supply for measurements.
The instrument does not boot, but unplugging and re-plugging the cables fixes this issue. After some analysis of the theory of operation, a 1G-Ohm resistor is used for performance verification. The resistor is also measured against the Keysight & Keithley 8.5-digit/7.5-digit multimeters as well as the Keithley 2470 1000V SMU.
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TNP #29 - How many LEDs can you light up with a hot dog?
16.8K views
March 31, 2023 8:26 PM
In this Episode Shahriar attempts to answer a fundamental scientific question, within the budget of The Signal Path. In this case, the question that has confounded scientists since the invention of LEDs: How many LEDs can you light up using a hot dog?!
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TSP #224 - Signal Hound SM435C 43.5GHz Real-Time Spectrum Analyzer Review, Teardown & Experiments
36.2K views
March 25, 2023 11:08 PM
In this episode Shahriar reviews the successor to the popular Signal-Hound SM200C, the SM435C Real-Time Spectrum Analyzer covering 100kHz – 43.5GHz with 160MHz of gapless I/Q steaming using a 10GbE optical interface.
https://signalhound.com/products/sm435c-43-5-ghz-real-time-spectrum-analyzer-with-10gbe/
With its constantly improving Spike software and incredible 1THz/s sweep rate, the SM435C has the potential to be a dream software-defined radio as well as a powerful laboratory & field instrument. This detailed review is organized as follows:
00:00 – Introduction
01:47 – Instrument overview & design
03:49 – Teardown, detailed circuits & systems overview and analysis including X-Ray imaging
16:33 – Analysis of a 24GHz pulsed radar module, real-time capability, zero-span mode, fast sweeps
29:06 – Noise figure personality and noise-figure measurements features
33:40 – Phase noise personality and characterizing the internal instrument phase-noise
35:49 – mm-Wave transmit mixer characteristics, digital demodulation capabilities
39:05 – Wideband IF output for digital demodulation using a Keysight MXR & PathWave VSA
41:35 – Wideband IF output for rapid pulse hopping analysis using a Tektronix MSO-6B Series
45:06 – Additional Spike software features
46:11 – Concluding remarks
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TSP #223 - Tektronix THDP0100 ±6kV High Voltage Differential Probe Teardown, Repair & Analysis
18.1K views
March 6, 2023 12:20 AM
In this episode Shahriar repairs another high-voltage Tektronix probe, this time a THDP0100 which is capable of measuring 6kV signals up to 100MHz. The probe does not get detected by the scope. However, it soon becomes clear that the problem with this probe is much more involved than the previous repair.
The probe has a short-circuit inside the probe body as well as several damaged components. Each is replaced one step at a time until a final fault is also detected in the probe head. After the repair, the probe is zeroed, calibrated and used to measure a signal at 6kVpp using an Associated Research HYPOT tester.
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