Good Evening Everyone. I have just started learning how to communicate with an Agilent 8753ES via GPIB to USB interface, prior to yesterday I did not know what a GPIB interface was, and I have some rather noobish questions that I am hoping for some guidance on.
I have installed Keysight Connection Expert, LabView, and NI Measurements and Automation. I don't know if I need the two latter software packages. I also don't really understand what exactly they are or how to use them.
My initial task is to perform a calibration on the network analyzer and save that cal data over the GPIB interface to a laptop. That cal data will then also be loaded back to the network analyzer. Later on when I perform some tests I will need to save that data as well for further analysis.
Can I do all of this with the Keysight Interactive IO program? I have the programmers guide and I see the examples but don't know how to load a program and run it within the network analyzer, or even if that is worded correctly. Any assistance is greatly appreciated!
There's no way to run your own programs on the 8753, whereas it is on the Windows based PNAs.
As I stated before, I don't think there's a way of saving calibration files onto a laptop. At least not easily. The manual does say
"OUTPDATF outputs the error corrected data from the active channel in the current output format. This data may be input to the analyzer using the INPUDATA command."
So its possible to save the error corrected data, which possibly has the calibration coefficients, and put them back. But maybe it does not have the error correction data.
If I were you, I would start a new thread, with a title such as
"Ping Dr_Joel - can I save calibration data from an 8753ES to a laptop?"
and ask the real expert, Dr_Joel, - one of the main designers of the 8753 series. He is "God" when it comes to the 8753 - and I'm an atheist ! He may be able to tell you a supported way, or perhaps a way that will work, that's unsupported.
(He might also tell you to upgrade to a later machine, but of course that's not always practical for companies).
You can save data, along with the calibration, to an internal floppy disk or internal memory. You could do that by GPIB. But I don't know a way of retrieving them with GPIB.
You can also save one set of parameters to a register named UPRESET, which is a user preset function, and will store the calibration data, so the VNA starts up with that data. But that's not really what you want, as you only have one set of data.
Remember you are supposed to re-calibrate if the temperature changes by more than 1 deg C.
I assume you are writing code from a lesser competent person to make measurements, without re-calibrating. It might be easier to get an ECal, and tell them to connect cables to the ECal first.
I said I would give you the source code of the program I wrote. Bear in mind
* It is command line driven - I'm not keen on GUIs, as I can do things quicker without them.
* It was written for an National Instruments card
* It has only ever been compiled on a SPARC running Solaris 9 or 10.
* I would expect it to compile with an NI card, the NI drivers on a Linux or Unix system.
* I never intended it for distribution, so there's no documentation, apart from a few bits in the program which print some information.
* It is quite messy, as it had things I intended adding, but never did. It really needs a total cleanup, but I'm not really that motivated, as I wrote it for myself. But I have attached it anyway.
* Use at your own risk. If it screws up your VNA, formats your hard drive, don't come moaning to me!
It is released under the GPL version 2.0
Dave