I'm making my own pyvisa driver for some P9371A VNAs we recently purchased.
The help file indicates in at least one place that there is no good way to turn channels on and off with SCPI commands(note None in table below copied from help file):
CF_Channel Commands
Channel 1 - 8 Tab Commands | ||
Softkey | Sub-item | SCPI |
Channel 1 | On/Off | None |
Channel 2 | On/Off | None |
Channel 3 | On/Off | None |
Channel 4 | On/Off | None |
Channel 5 | On/Off | None |
Channel 6 | On/Off | None |
Channel 7 | On/Off | None |
Channel 8 | On/Off | None |
Are there any plans to update this SCPI functionality? It seems like channels are close to unusable with SCPI. But yet, quite a few commands take cnum (channel number) as a parameter.
As a work-around, it looks like I could abandon channels altogether and instead manipulate traces and windows. But even that does not seem to be as straightforward as one might hope...
I am guessing that you are talking about the act of turning channels on and off from the front panel as shown in the GIF above. From the GUI, turning on a channel is a one-click operation but from SCPI that is actually a combination of 3 different commands:
1- create the S11 measurement in the channel you want (example channel 2):
2- Select the measurement:
3- put the new measurement trace in the window you want to display it in:
now to delete the channel, you have to delete all the measurements that are associated with that channel. for that there is a single command (again using channel 2 as the example):
so this is not a missing SCPI functionality, just a difference in operating theory between the GUI and the remote API