Measuring impedances at audio frequencies

I love my 3577!

It came from Iomega, and cost US$2000

recently I rented it to someone, and that paid for it :)

Cheers Terry

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Terry, can you comment on some aspects of its man interface quality?

I ask this because I'm considering buying one too, and have ATM a 4195A a client lent me for a project, and it wasn't half a day of use that I found it has a lot to desire on some ergonomy aspects. Really minor details, but the kind of one that you tempest against when you are faced with (not consistant or brainless position of menu keys for ex, ...).

These kind of things are hard if not impossible to figure from the documentation, but instantly become obvious with the instrument at hand.

I knew the marketing guy for the 3577 - originally the maximum frequency was only 10 or 20MHz, John had to work quite hard to persuade the project manager to increase it to 200MHz.

Regards Ian

Hi Fred,

sure. to be fair, my impressions are coloured by the fact that *I have a network analyser*, and it has saved me several weeks of work on one particular job (120 bode plots with 80dB dynamic range done manually, for each of a dozen units? measuring production spread, bugger that for a joke).

It took me perhaps 10 minutes to get it up and running, and maybe another 30-40 mins to discover all the various settings I use (eg save/recall, setting up maths so I can measure normalised impedance, etc. there are buttons for most things (cf bloody menus), and the up/down keys make changing sweep rates etc. a doddle.

This machine was built well before HP started f****ng everything up with Windoze, and it shows.

I have not yet tried the HPIB stuff - I mean to get a USBHPIB at some stage, but for now use a digital camera :)

HTH

Cheers Terry