EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Test Equipment => Topic started by: Dr.Virus on May 18, 2019, 02:13:36 am
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Hi, Long time lurker, first time poster =)
So It seems the stars have aligned and I've been offered to be notified when a particular piece of test equipment is to be dumped into the electronics recycling bin.
The unit is a Spectrum Analyzer written off as "BER" (Beyond Economical Repair) and apparently due to rules that are beyond my comprehension, the lab tech says their only course of action are to either donate it or 'dump' it, as selling/auctioning it is not an option.
The unit in question is..... an E7405A EMC Spectrum Analyzer, 9 kHz to 26.5 GHz!!, He said he was told by his predecessor that someone once upon a time had mistaken the unit for its similar looking E4403B cousin and fed DC into the RF input :-BROKE :palm: (E4403B has 100V DC tolerant input, while E7405A is 0VDC) and apparently this unit has been sitting on the top shelf collecting dust for the last 20 years written off as 'broken'.
When the unit was shown to me last week, it didn't power on. But I stayed after work today (as I'd prefer not to be seen taking apart a bunch of test equipment in the lab lol) and played musical chairs Power-Supplies with another BER unit and Lo and Behold! it Powers up! AND it seems to work perfectly fine?!?! Although I only had time to run a self check, and a readout with it's own 50MHz ref fed back to itself... I quickly chickened out and replaced the power supply ASAP, as to anyone walking by, it would probably look like I was tearing apart all their carefully calibrated equipment lol :wtf:
It does throw a minor error, something about System alignment, all needed now, blah blah... but I noticed the time was Dec 0, 0 and 0 o'clock so I'm sure its just the cmos/RTC battery being drained which seems pretty common for these units of such vintage.
I guess My question is.. Does an EMC Spectrum Analyzer work as a a 'normal' Spectrum analyzer? Is it just an E4408B with an EMC persona, ..possibly a superset of the ESA E440X? or does it lack certain functions so HP/Agilent/Keysight/XXX can sell you both |O
I don't really need/care about the EMC stuff, my home bench is missing a spectrum analyzer and a one with 26GHz range would be my crown jewel. I'd probably set the thing on my night stand just so its the first thing I see in the morning (although I think GF would protest :-DD )