Products > Test Equipment
Aeroflex 7100 Upgrade
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KD1RX:
So I bought myself one of those Aeroflex 7100s on eBay thinking that it was cheap enough that even if it was a total bust I could at least part it out.  Thankfully I didn't have to do that.

Step one was booting it as-is and making sure it did what it was advertised to do.  It did.  It was also totally full of viruses.

Step two was pulling the hard drive (conveniently located in an externally-accessible caddy) and replacing it with a new SATA SSD that I had lying around.

Step three: install Windows 10 32-bit edition.  Went super smoothly, even recognized the touchscreen.

Step four: install NI VISA (need 19.5 or earlier as 32 bit operation was dropped after that), Aeroflex PXI Module software and Aeroflex PXI Studio.  The Aeroflex software is available on Viavi's website, and it needs to be installed in Windows 7 compatibility mode.

Step five: pop the front panel and wire the front panel connectors directly to the PXI instruments.  I didn't bother trying to figure out their proprietary switch/combiner matrix.  If somebody wants to do that I'd be interested in the result.

Step six: profit!  Both sources and both receivers appear to work well.  In addition, the sources have the 2 GByte sample memory option, which is pretty snazzy.

If anyone knows how to buy the generic demodulation key for the 3035C receivers in this, I'd be very interested in that.
KD1RX:
Update: Windows 10 was being a bit wonky and the Aeroflex software was unstable.  Downgraded to Windows 7 Professional and everything seems to be much happier.
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