Agilent PXI data N7150A, N7157A, M9430A, Etc

[ZL1CVD]

Hi I'm trying to locate datasheets and drivers for some older Agilent PXI cards N7150A, N7157A &  M9430A. I can find scant reference to some but nothing really useful. Any bright ideas?

[ZL1CVD]

Managed to extract M9430A Windows 7 64-bit drivers from the E6640A XSA installer off Keysight website.

Device manager now shows it so does VISA.   

For NI VISA to see it, you must install the horrible Keysight IO libraries. They seem to have removed handy features from the older Agilent version & have no idea how to write an uninstaller - leaves rubbish all over the hard drive and in the registry. 

Now to see if I can write some useful tools to get this Vector Signal Transceiver cracking...

73s de chris zl1cvd

[tmbinc]

What's in a E6640A? I assume 4xM943{0,1,2}A, and some 100MHz source. Is there anything else?

[ZL1CVD]

..a controller running Win 7-64bit. Not sure what else..

[tmbinc]

So I obtained a M9430A (be careful; those that are currently on ebay tend to miss parts because someone mishandled the PCB. Especially, some are missing the outermost LTM4601V, which means the PCB was bent enough that it popped off.. oops), and tried to get it working.

Installed the E6640A software, and figured out the right config files to create. Created a E6640AModules.conf, xSAInstConfig.xml with (hopefully) the right contents. My setup is an M9018A (18 slot PXIe Gen2 chassis) with M9021A (Gen 2, x8 PCIe cable interface) to a Dell T3600 using a M9047A (PCIe Desktop adapter), so not quite the original setup. On top of that, I'm missing the M9300A frequency reference so I supply an external 100MHz instead. I patched the DLLs to remove the dependency on M9300A and the chassis control.

However, something is definitely broken with my module, because the self-test fails for one of the voltages on the receiver board:


[...]
Receiver;FD1;1000;-100;Receiver_Digital_1_2V      0.675558    1.1       1.26        FAIL
Receiver;FD1;1000;-100;Receiver_Digital_1V        0.99115     0.441     1.54        PASS
Receiver;FD1;1000;-100;Receiver_Digital_1_8V      1.76566     1.64      1.89        PASS


I tried to power up the board on my desk, but did something stupid and now I need to replace the 74TVC16222A level shifter. (Duh!)

The M9430A isn't bad hardware though; it's a 6GHz VSA/VSG with a 1GS/s DAC on the VSG side, and 400MS/s ADC on the VSA side, providing 160 MHz of analysis bandwidth...

I wonder how different they are to the M9420A (VXT). They look identical, the specs are identical.