Products > Test Equipment
Agilent E4406A Vector Signal Analyser
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G0HZU:
I bought one of these Agilent E4406A vector signal analysers a few days ago to play with for analogue and digital demod purposes. These versatile instruments can be purchased for just a few hundred pounds these days.

http://www.keysight.com/en/pd-1000002790%3Aepsg%3Apro-pn-E4406A/vsa-transmitter-tester-7-mhz-to-4-ghz?cc=US&lc=eng

I wondered how many other E4406A users are on here and what they use it for? I plan to use mine as a research tool to demodulate/verify various analogue and digital signals.

Therefore, I've bought mine purely for signal analysis rather than spectrum analysis and I plan to dump data from it and do the demodulation etc in a remote PC. At the moment I'm playing with some legacy Agilent SW tools that offer various demodulation personalities. I've so far managed to configure an old laptop to control the E4406A and take data from it via LAN or GPIB and this seems to run OK with the older Agilent SW and the E4406A after a bit of persuasion...

I've also loaded the latest firmware to mine over LAN and also calibrated the internal 10MHz oven via LAN as per the procedure in the manual. I'm probably going to replace the Lithium coin cell battery on the main CPU card.

Has anyone done this already? Is it easy to take apart and gain access to the battery? I've not had the covers off to look inside yet...
G0HZU:
W2AEW did a couple of videos showing what an RTSA can do when analysing a VHF transmitter on keyup here:





So I had a play with the E4406A today and the Agilent SW to see if it could do something similar. I've only spent a few minutes on this but I managed to replicate the same results. The playback is very fluid and can be manually incremented to microsecond resolution. So the spectrum can be played back very slowly and watched as the radio transmitter locks up.

See the two images below.

I'm struggling a bit with the spectogram feature but I managed to get it to do something in the second image.
To get these plots I'm using some fairly modern analysis tools from Agilent that can be persuaded to work with the E4406A. This is just scratching the surface but there's a lot of things that can be done (in a PC)  with the data a E4406A can spit out. 
G0HZU:
I did a quick and dirty youtube video to try and capture how fluid the data capture and playback is.

Maybe it can go faster as I did this via GPIB rather than high speed LAN between the E4406A and the PC.

The top right plot is the demodulated FM spectrum as I've included FM demodulation in the analysis. So it's possible to look at FM transmitter audio distortion etc.

But you can see it's quite impressive (unlike my video making skills :) )

https://youtu.be/T7wIXfE-2BE
Neganur:
I've been eyeing one for a while now and I would use it to characterise amplifier stages etc.
The only real obstacle in my eyes is the 10 MHz span and I've been wondering if it's feasible to just do wider sweeps by combining 10 MHz pieces on an external computer.
I have not found any info on how much time it takes to change the span nor how fast the data transfer is. To my knowledge this is an FFT SA that should be quite fast.
nctnico:

--- Quote from: Neganur on April 05, 2015, 07:23:22 pm ---The only real obstacle in my eyes is the 10 MHz span and I've been wondering if it's feasible to just do wider sweeps by combining 10 MHz pieces on an external computer.

--- End quote ---
On a 'real' spectrum analyser a detailed sweep of a large span is slow as well. Stitching 10MHz sweeps together shouldn't be much slower if you can transfer the data at a reasonable speed.
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