R&S FSP38

[Omicron]

I came upon a R&S FSP38 Spectrum Analyser that sold inexpensively because it was faulty. It seems that a batch of these units have found their way onto the second hand market from the US government. My example came from the Marine corps, which in itself is interesting. The unit is practically unused and spent its entire life in storage. Probably in a hot place which could explain the problem it has: an EEPROM that has lost some bits. Every module in these machines has an EEPROM that contains things like the serial number of the module and calibration data. This particular EEPROM is on the front end module and the faulty data in it is causing a 1st LO unlock. Fortunately, the hard disk in these units has a backup of the contents of all the EEPROMs so this problem should be fixable. But before I open the thing up and desolder the EEPROM to reprogram it, I was wondering if there might be some service function to re-program the EEPROMs. It makes sense I think that if they took the trouble to make backups of the EEPROMs there would be a restore function as well. Does anyone happen to know? The service manual does mention a service function to program the EEPROM of the IF filter module, but unfortunately says nothing about the other modules.

[bncengr]

I think you can hold the "." (period) button while it powers up to do what you're asking. I know that re-enumerates all the modules.

Cross your fingers. A 1st LO unlock could also be a bad front end unit.

[Omicron]

That does the opposite: it creates the backups. In fact that’s how I know the EEPROM is bad because when I do this it logs an error for every bad block (2 of them in my case). Luckily it is smart enough not to overwrite a previous backup in this case.