In message <CAFoWNwBDPPnjEF8gBsFWsFPCFc6qhG+dWG=oYEAhuGgU=wh...@mail.gmail.com> , Jan Fredriksson writes: >One thing that strikes me reading old 3458A product datasheet from HP is >that they stressed the high measurement speed, 100kHz @ 16 bit, but not >empasizing much the DC accuracy.
If I had no scruples at all, I would start digitizing audio using two HP3558A's synchronized to a Cesium frequency standard, and market it to the audio-homoepathy segment at prices you can not even imagine :-) >Now, the 3458A remains state of the art in >DC accuracy / liearity, but for high speed measurements and of course >frequency, the 3458 is now nowhere near state of the art any more. The biggest issue is that you cannot use an external sample-clock, but only free-wheel the 3458A. NIST did modify a 3458A during some of their J-J AC experiments, so they could synchronize the sampling to the synthetic AC generated by the J-J. I don't know how "state of the art" it is or isn't, you can obviously buy chips which do 100 GS/s @ 16 bits these days, but my impression is that they are nowhere near the HP3458A in absolute precision or for that matter, reference stability. The main limitation is that the HP3458A has very little RAM, so to use the 100kHz sampling-rate, you need to download and run code which can compress the samples in real-time, preferably into something GPIB almost can keep up with. That is easier than it sounds, but still a hazzle most people would prefer to be without. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ volt-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volt-nuts and follow the instructions there.
