I'm an engineer in R&S too. Nice to see you here. It is really good the kind of understanding that TSP gets on these devices without any schematics

Hi Alan! No, I have had it for several years. :)

Thanks! Improvement to the tips would be hugely welcome!

Will the AKL-PT1 be back on sale at some point?

@@BaconbuttywithCheese It never was sold openly in this form. I did a kickstarter for the 2.5 GHz first revision then massively improved it to the 6 GHz bandwidth prototype Shahriar is using. I'm still making slight tweaks to improve flatness and ergonomics before a full launch. Its solder-in flex sibling, the AKL-PT2, is available now.

IC's tend to be reliable now, as the early failure modes were researched and understood, and fixes applied to the process path for the more reputable manufacturers. The cheap ones know how they will fail, and roughly how long that will take, so just build good enough, to last that long for the vast majority of the devices. I would say R&S, and most of the other top end manufacturers, know the equipment might be in use for decades, so go for the most reliable IC's in there, and good quality for the rest as well.

I find these all the time

MLCCs will crack easily if heated unevenly, and silver migration through the cracks courtesy of lead-free solder will ultimately do the rest (note the Pb-free symbol on the board). An unholy combination. To think that an instrument like this (few things R&S are ever cheap) can be taken out by a single bad one like ordinary consumer electronics is wild. I hope R&S have at least considered going with automotive grade MLCCs in more recent times. This model appears to be from the mid-late 2000s.

@@LordPrecision but all this eco-posturing makes purple dyed hair people feel superior about themselves

Eco-posturing? Pathetic.

Hi! I think, it's because the reference level is 9dBm (it's too much for preciece measurements) and large RBW (3MHz). Or maybe cheap 5% accuracy capacitor... Who knows😀

I have a R&S VNA with the transputers, it’s pretty great. But I never knew that people wanted them.

Haha... Only if it were as easy to get this schematics as it is to get an Apple laptop schematic.

@@Thesignalpath you mean Paul Daniels doesn't have board view software for that? :)

FSL is from the low cost (low performance) series.

I do almost no editing at all. It is just recorded sequentially and stitched together. I normally don't spend more than 20 minutes on editing.

so it's almost a recorded talk

I have seen this a few times when caps close to mount hole would crack due to mechanical stress.

3 MHz of RBW and a fairly high reference level with 30dB frontend attenuation increases the noisefloor quite a bit. Additionally this SA might not be the lowest noise instrument

It is from the entry line series. Low performance, low cost.

These are the RF traces. Solder mask is a poor dielectric material and is often avoided on RF paths. It is also generally not included in the EM simulations.

@@Thesignalpath Thanks. Can you explain more about this "Solder mask is a poor dielectric material"?

eBay!

@@Thesignalpath What do you do with repaired units? Do you sell them back?

Almost all physical processes, but especially all electrical characteristics of semiconductors (diodes, transistors and similar components) or vacuum tubes, are "non-linear". That means, linear change of a parameter, e.g. applied voltage or resulting current do not show a linear, uniform change of the corresponding result. In order to represent this optimally, these values are graphically displayed in curve form in a so-called "4 - quadrant characteristic curve field" - "The I-V Characteristic Curve". This enables the simultaneous representation of 4 characteristic curves, in 4, horizontally and vertically adjacent fields, registered on a +x -x +y -y axis cross (Field number: I - V), with change of their values (voltage, current, resistance etc.). Sources: (Excellent) translation program : www.deepl.com/translator duckduckgo.com/?q=4+quadrant+characteristic+transistor&t=ffsb&atb=v96-1&ia=web fytronix.com/PHYSIC-EQUIPMENTS/Characteristic-curves-of-semiconductors-PHY2013.pdf www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0042207X19304555 duckduckgo.com/?q=4+quadranten+kennlinienfeld+transistor&t=ffsb&atb=v96-1&ia=web duckduckgo.com/?q=4+quadrant+characteristic+transistor&t=ffsb&atb=v96-1&iax=images&ia=images duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=the+I-V+characteristic+of+a+catode&atb=v96-1&ia=web Greetings ... :)

@@christophbrand i feel bad now, because I was making a joke... i know what I-V characteristics are and I know what cathodes are but not what CATodes are...

@@GeorgeTsiros Hmm ... ok... well... I'm not angry with you. I hope you had at least a little bit of fun, otherwise it would have been all for nothing. Well, it was also a little bit fun for me too, rummage in old memories of my education, which are already a little bit "dusty". ... ... ... I think, the way you meant it is probably the ode (poem form) to a cat was meant ... oh what ... is also no matter. You have led me, once again, clearly in mind, in any situation not to lose the "view of the whole", and at least to keep the/my humor. For me, humor, fun and jokes are a very unique and (and especially related to the "present time" ... an over-) vital essence of life itself. It helps reliably to get over "bad times", and I had more than enough of them in this life .... With kind regards christoph

@@christophbrand look, _i_ may not needed your explanation, but others quite certainly do! Your effort was absolutely worth it, because anyone here can read it and get some information!

A narrow vision... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste

@@Thesignalpath Yep. And if right-to-repair legislation makes providing schematics (and hopefully layout) mandatory the X-Ray could be skipped.

@@Thesignalpath You should send this to R&S. No schematics, no manuals, no parts. Pure arrogance creating land fills of dead R&S products.

@@Thesignalpath Repair and Reuse, Shariar is doing his utmost to get the last one, Recycle, out of common use, as repair and reuse is the most use of the rare elements that were used, and gives the lowest impact on the environment as well. That he also gets some impressive use out of them is also a bonus. Then of course the equipment that is tossed for an utterly trivial fault is the best value as well.

@@shazam6274 First of all, R&S does not perform component level repair. No big T&M company does. The board would be tossed out and replaced. We are not even taking into account the cost of shipping and repairing it. Aside from that, it represents an opportunity to offer education on top of the repair benefit.

No, they will simply swap the board with a new one, and charge you $15k for that, and extra for the calibration afterwards.

@@SeanBZA EXACTLY what happened on my RTO scope. Two channels just dead suddenly one day (seems like communication problem between front end board and main board). They swapped the main board and calibrate, which costs $6,000! I still don't know why it's broken or even maybe no hardware is broken?

now the question is, would it be more or less expensive than 6k to pay an engineer to actually find the fault, fix it, and verify everything to a level that you're confident in the fix as a company?

@@tommihommi1 Why employ engineers full-time when you can short-term contract them to do the initial design, and then vanish them with a draconian NDA in their back pocket? All of these companies are the same now - They have impressive research departments, but are mostly just marketing companies that hire the odd bit of part-time talent from time to time. Compare the above to a robot in China spitting these boards out at 10 per second.

@@digitalradiohacker the engineers are busy designing the next generation, from what I know Rohde Germany is a decent employer

Limited time to record.

I have enabled the Auto Caption. Hopefully you can set it to any language now.

I am sorry. But it is a matter of lack of time.

KZfaq has a playback speed feature. Watching at 0.75x or 0.5x speed may help.