TNP #32 - Fluke 732A DC (10V, 1.018V, 1V) Reference Standard Quick Repair
11.8K views
April 22, 2023 5:15 PM
In this episode Shahriar quickly repairs a faulty Fluke 732A DC Reference Standard. Although the unit does produce a good 10V and 1.018V output, the 1V output shows no voltage at all. A close examination of the schematic shows that the 1V output is derived through a resistor divider from the 10V source.
Since no resistance can be measured from the 1V to any of the other ports, it is suspected that the failure is caused by a broken connection behind the front panel. The connection is corrected and the unit produces all desired output signals.
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TNP #31 - HP 87421 & 83017A 26.5GHz Microwave System Amplifier Teardown, Repair & Experiments
15.3K views
April 9, 2023 10:58 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
17.1K views
April 2, 2023 10:28 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 9:26 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
36.7K views
March 26, 2023 12:08 AM
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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