Fantastic work. Causes me some dispare as I am 64 years old and totally lost on all the software aspect. Would not know where to start to learn it. Was an electronic technical offer since the late 70s and kept up with everything until 20 years ago. An analogue and RF expert. Frustrating how dated ones knowledge becomes and how one falls behind. But very enjoyable to see these new projects.

Hello Seb. Had the classic HP141T years ago ... it was a magical piece of test equipment. Excellent video ... thanks for sharing. Hope to have a QSO some day. Take care ... Mike VE3XLF

Nice work, now your HP141T is modern again! Also it's nice to see another Linux user out there!

Great video! Very clean and polished, great job :) It looks great when you zoom in on the equipment.

That is sure an interesting project. I am looking forward to see how it develops.

Wonderful job I have the same analyzer and this little upgrade is really useful expecially when the analyzer is in slow scan time

Looking forward to the follow up... The printer option will be nice. My 141T is still working fine but the ability to instruct a tracking generator OR to simply provide step by step "sweep instructions" to a regular generator through your display unit will be really nice. Thanks for sharing your work.

I just re-watched the video in hopes I could just figure out how to replace the screen by itself with no options, except may the graph and scale, but even those could be printed on clear plastic and laid on the screen for us code illiterate folks. In addition I was hoping you'd do a quick follow up video on how to use the board and load the software on it, at least we could reproduce the project and go from there. I think this project has many Industrial/Hobby applications in converting old CRT XY outputs into larger LCD screens. I think the software could be used to monitor the ADC inputs/peaks and determine the frequencies and amplitudes based on those alone and then display the results on the screen. This is such a great project to build on, not only for the 141T but, for all CRT based screens where measurements are manually done. With this project those measurement could now be done by the software and displayed. Thanks again for such a great video. Makes me want to learn programing to work on those ideas I just mentioned. Best Wishes & Blessings. Keith Noneya

... I HAVE FOUND YOU> I SHALL NEVER LET YOU GO. i have trawled the internet for years to find exactly this content.

I have a 8558B in a 180TR display frame. I've been thinking about retrofitting the CRT with a LCD. Your project will be a good starting point for me.

Awesome work!!!!

Love it! Keep up the great Work!

Awesome video thank you for sharing your knowledge enjoyed and learned

Awesome project and MAD programming skillz

Fantastic project. Way beyond my capabilities but interesting all the same. Karl,

very good stuff ........... well done !

Compliments for such an interesting and useful project! Did you make any progress in this project? Is the second part ready to be upload? We are all waiting for this! Regards

Good stuff mate

wow. super cool . nice job.

Great video

I was wondering it you were going to work more on this project? Thanks for the great video I thoroughly enjoyed it. Best Wishes & Blessings. Keith Noneya

I'll need to try this once I get my hands on one to try and trouble shoot my 10 GHz rig.

You have my instant subscribe.

Fantastic!

Hi Seb, what a great project, I going to get a STM32F74g board and follow your progress I have a HP141t here which i am not using.it will now be come useful. 73 Gary vk2kyp

Awesome Stuff thx

Good Stuff

Excellent video and explanation. Especially nice work on the waterfall display and interfacing it with the tracking generator. One correction: 141T was actually being made as early as 1969, and some of the other 140-series mainframes are even older! I suspect yours is a 1970's model, as the later ones from the 1980's that I've seen all use a slightly different CRT. I can explain how to easily date HP serial numbers if you are curious what year yours is. With regards to the code for reading the instrument settings, even if you interface to the D-sub on the back, I suspect you will still have a real challenge in estimating the start/stop frequencies precisely, as the LO sweep is controlled by an analog ramp rather than a phase-locked synthesizer. This is going to become especially problematic at narrow sweep bandwidths, as the first LO in the 8555A drifts around noticeably. In a sense, the 141T doesn't really "know" what its exact LO frequency is at any given time. If you need a clean way to connect to the rear D-subs, there is info online on what kinds of mixed-contact D-subs are used (known as a 17W5 IIRC, but you can use backshells for 37-position D-subs for the back portion). I did a partial write-up a while back when I made a replacement cable for my 8445B preselector: www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/making-a-replacement-cable-for-a-hp-8445b-spectrum-analyzer-preselector.150208/

Well done Sir, I own one of these and as soon as I can find some time I will try it out Keep up the good work. Mans. 9H1Gb

Super cool. You can get some easy wins by replacing that LM358 with an OPA277 (but you lose out with 1/f noise), OPA828 (great tempco, 1pA of input bias, and 4 nA per sqrt hz at 1k). Get a more powerful chip and drive a bigger screen, with more resolution so your waterfall doesn't look like an Atari . Considering the time investment you put into this, buying a Zync or SmartFusion2 or one of them SoC's with an FPGA on-board might be the sweet spot. The SoC will easily drive a 1024x768, and the FPGA can pull the ADC data and do all of the frame buffer junk. Also, when you hooked that TG up to your scope, did you just turn your scope into a low dynamic range SA, cos that's what it looked like....if so, 'super cool' turns into 'wat. awesome so awesome.

Hello very interesting video. you are very good at what you do. I have this HP unit and i would like to read out the center frequency. what is the easiest way to do that with some kind of frequency conter . With best regards klas jonsson Sweden. ps i am not near your knowledge but its all about learning.

Nice work Seb. Quick question though: Isn't there a GPIB interface on the back that you could take advantage of? I really need to shake the dust off of my Tektronix storage scope and see about doing something similar.

Hello. It's fantastic what you did. If I just won't to replace the crt with a lcd scren What is the simplest way to do it.

Courious if it will work on 140T ..

Weired question. From where did you get that white ink? :) Seems like some sort of a pigment ink.

I have one of these spectrum analysers , it would certainly be a useful project to change from a crt. The question is did you complete it ?

73's de F6EZI very good video I'm trying to follow you you are speaking very fast for me but I play your video many times to understand - tank you you give me many ideas

Sweet

I have the HP8565 Spectrum Analiser, would this LCD upgrade, work this work with that? I have the same sockets on mine. TIA

great i have 2 of these and dead tubes i hope i can implant your fantastic work here 73's de 4z4rb

Hi friend, I'm Claudio IU2AQS from italy. Nice work very compliments! Do you have rework this version or make a part 2?

Cześć,Mam taki analizator i z wielką radością zobaczyłem twoją modernizację ,chciałbym wprowadzić taką zmianę w moim HP141T . proszę o pomocz z softem .Pobrałem soft z GitHub (Compiles with STM32Cube_FW_F7_V1.17.0) próbuję to załadować do STM32F746G i nic z tego.Nie mam wiedzy w jaki sposób mam ten plik załadować do disco .Komputer jest połączony przez usb z disco ,na pulpicie urządzenie DIS_F746 wgrywam lecz na ekranie disco nic się nie dzieje .Proszę o pomoc.

Why you are not making any video? it could have been 100K+ subscriber

great ... i think my 141 display is damaged and i want to test this solution

Do you have a picture of whats happening at 5:13?

Did you ever get around to completing this project?

Can I purchase one from you?

Did you ever finish?

That's not a "waterfall". The term generally means a series of sweeps presented in a 3d-ish manner. Your mode is usually called a spectrogram. Very nice tho :)

*(**2:27**).... ON THIS HP ..YOU CAN **#SEE** THE "SAME" .!* *JUST TO MAKE IT CLEAR* *AND ..IS NOT BAD "JUST FIND OUT HOW TO" ...* *BUT ... GOOD VIDEO*

Will be interested to see the hardware. I recently breadboarded f1frv.free.fr/main3n_HP141T.html after ordering the mentioned opamps and was getting terrible signal results that I'm pretty sure wasn't due to the unshielded cables. I found that you can bring down the 16V-18V pen lift to around 500mV with a simple BNC Tee adapter and 50 ohm terminator. This puts both signals well within the voltage range of a soundcard input and don't need to build a circuit. You don't get the Y inversion of course and would need to correct for that in software which many of them can do. I opted to purchase www.ebay.com/itm/272787408868 rather than make my own and it looks good even though the cable isn't shielded.

Dat zsh

kelvin hertz (KHz)? I think you meant kilo hertz (kHz).

I'm replicating your build with a 141T 8555A 8552B and its a week away in the mail. I noticed you don't have a schematic up or reference PDF from your circuit. Can you DM or reply on here and upload to your website? It would be a big help! Thank you for the upload!