RFID Transponder reader/writer for TK5530???

I have looked in the usual places (to no avail) for info on an HPIB card, 27209, to see if it's compatible with the everyday IBM clone CPU. Also, what software is out there that's compatible with it to access an HP8563E Spectrum Analyzer. Any help would be appreciated, TIA. Tom

I have looked in the usual places (to no avail) for info on an HPIB card, 27209, to see if it's compatible with the everyday IBM clone CPU. Also, what software is out there that's compatible with it to access an HP8563E Spectrum Analyzer. Any help would be appreciated, TIA. Tom

Surf your way to the following URL:

It has some information on the HP 27209 card.

The HP 27209 card is very similar to the HP 82335 card which came a little later. Any HP 82335 driver should work with the HP 27209 card.

The HP 27209 card has an 8K BIOS chip on it. This must be set to an address that does not conflict with your system.

I don't think any driver exists past Windows 3.1 for the HP 27209/82335 cards. I might be wrong about that. In fact, I don't know what DOS drivers exist for those cards.

What do you want to do with your HP8563E spectrum analyzer? It might be easier to go with a more recent card that has better software available. What is your budget? If you could afford it, you would be better off going with a

National Instruments GPIB card, and a software package such as LabView.

For information on LabView, go to

Aidan Grey

s/CPU/PC/

The 27209 is an old HPIB card that works with any PC that (still ;-) has an ISA slot. In contrast to more recent (PCI) cards it requires a bit of fiddling with the IRQ and i/o ports, but it works fine.

Among others, it is supported by the linux-gpib drivers, see

To "talk" to any device over GPIB, you need to know the GPIB (HBIB) command set of that instrument. This is usually described in the manual; with this, you can program your own software to interact with it.

Cheers + HTH,

- Joerg

--
joerg dot hau at swissonline dot ch * Lausanne, Switzerland
http://homepage.sunrise.ch/mysunrise/joerg.hau/
"All standard disclaimers apply".
remove the obvious from my address to reply

Or go look in your closet and pull out that old Commodore PET computer. With a massive 8K RAM, and an OS in

Try searching

for "Benchlink." It costs a few hundred bucks, but if anything would work with the older HPIB hardware, it should be Agilent's own package.

However: it's VERY unlikely that you'll be able to use that card under any post-Win95 version of Windows, and almost certainly not under any NT-based version like Win2K or XP. I would suggest taking the other posters' advice and upgrading to a newer PCI-GPIB or similar card from National Instruments. They're easy to find on eBay, and the drivers are free from

. Pay attention to the OS compatibility chart for the card you're looking at; the older PCII/IIA cards don't have newer OS drivers.

If I'm not mistaken, the 8563E is backwards-compatible with the HP 8566B command set. Assuming that's true, you can probably use my free

7470.exe app (at to grab screen captures from it. It will require an NI card, though. Frankly, I wouldn't waste a whole lot of time trying to get the HP card to work with anything, unless the 8563E uses custom calibration/maintenance software that demands it.

-- jm

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Note: My E-mail address has been altered to avoid spam

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I think the Benchlink series of interfaces (IIRC, HP had about 5, customized towards generators or analyzers or DMM's, etc) are now "unsupported" products, and as such, may not even be being sold by Agilent.

HP seemed to "allow" the Benchlink packages to be loosely distributed, because the Benchlink application, upon being installed, had a 30-day timer. After that period (in which you were supposed to buy an authorization code form HP), the program stops operating.

So, unless you can get an authorization code from someplace, the fun's all over next month.

Ed wb6wsn

Thanks for all of the valuable information you gentlemen have supplied. It's now time for me to investigate the purchase of a current version NI card and stop wasting time on an antique, Hi.

Thanks to all, Tom

CPU.

an