Hello all,
I have a question about where I should start in an overhaul of my newly purchased HP 3114A function generator. It is the original model with the hard plastic buttons, circa 1986 I believe.
A little background on me, I am an electrical engineering student, first time post here. I have worked as an electrical engineering technician for several years, so I am very comfortable with soldering and useage of lab equipment, and I have a very nice scope and logic analyzer and LCR meter and such, so I just need some basic advice on how to improve the waveform quality on this thing.
I notice in the service manual that there are a lot of things I can do calibration wise, but the only problem I am really having with the unit is the waveform quality.
The higher the frequency, the worse the distortion, at ~5mhz I really start to notice overshoot in the square wave and a little bit of distortion in the triangle wave, and at ~20mhz, the sine and triangle look the same (mediocre sine wave, triangle is a little dirtier) and the square wave is completely unstable, basically really bad overshoot and oscillation, not anywhere near flat, and it does not rise/fall as fast as it should (has a slight slope to it)... The frequency is pretty accurate, though I notice a little jitter on my scope.
My first thought is to just go through it and replace all the electrolytics. I am under the general impression that the inductors and ceramic caps should be OK.
Basically, I just want to give it a "tune-up" before I go through the procedures in the service manual only to find that I can't get it into spec because of old components, since the unit is almost 25 years old.
Any advice that can be given on what to watch for on these units would be appreciated. I would like to get this thing working right so I can start experimenting :D