My hp 4192A is coming!

A Beast! What did you pay for it? The brokers want about $9K.

John

Yes, awwkk, but less on ebay... like this one going for $6k

Here's one I didn't get, thankfully, at $3,215 -- too much!

Here's mine, the lowest-price finish lately, who knows why:

Yes, awwkk, but less on ebay... like this one going for $6k

Here's one I didn't get, thankfully, at $3,215 -- too much!

Here's mine, the lowest-price finish lately, who knows why:

Ebay prices are sure erratic. I just nabbed an SD-22 sampling head for $1200,

but they usually go for a lot more. You just keep bidding low and eventually you get what you want.

John

It's also amazing what these folks are selling. Your seller's other recent sales included a "New Betta Sphere Display Aquarium" for $12, a "Seaclone 150 skimmer," and a "BRAND NEW BROWN LOUIS VUITTON MENS WALLET!" - modestly interesting, but no other technical items.

Audio at 13MHz? For the gold monster-cable crowd, perhaps.

I have a 4191A, which works well, although I just bought a second one featuring option 2. Guess I'd better learn about these batteries.

That's good to hear.

I use Bidnapper, recommended. I don't bid round numbers. Pick a price you like, then bid two increments above, say $2587 for $2500. This one finished well below my maximum bid. Amazing. :>)

Hello Winfield,

What do you want to do with it? Audio stuff?

We use the 4191A which goes to 1GHz. Great tool. Unfortunately the cal computer board conked a few days ago. Probably the backup battery passed out but I am not looking forward to lifting that heavy thing. It can give you a real back pain. No idea why they haven't placed the NiCd battery nicely on the back panel. I might just do that now.

The nice thing is that the HP folks have put so much in diagnostics into these things that the display tells you quite accurately where the patient is sick.

Regards, Joerg

LOL- I see you "sniped" them with 5 seconds to spare....your proxy was set for 2500 (?) and electron55 must have capped at 2480 or something.

Did you glance at the datasheet?

Actually, it does have a 2nd input port for gain / phase measurements. This replicates the combination of three other instruments I have, used together. When used this way, its two 1M scope-probe inputs can be used for rapid point-to-point vector ratio measurements over the 5Hz to 13MHz range.

But it's the impedance-measuring ability I'm most interested in, which is high-res (20,000 counts), reasonably-accurate (0.15%) over a wide range (1-ohm to 1M full scale), and rapid (58 ms/step) for detailed sweeping.

Its frequency resolution is 0.1ppm fs of each of four ranges (e.g., measure crystals for full modeling). It'll take the traditional Kelvin 4-wire floating measurements, which I can do now with other instruments more accurately (and slowly) at only a small number of frequencies (e.g. quickly find inductor coil self-resonance), or it'll measure complex impedance into ground (e.g., measure amplifier closed-loop output impedance), which I cannot easily do now. That I'm looking forward to.

It's best operated by computer with its HPIB IEEE-488 port for making detailed charts. I'd prefer to find a few good canned programs, but I'll probably write some from scratch. One can bring the data into a spreadsheet, or LABVIEW or MATLAB, etc.

So his "buy it now" price was just a guess on his part? Good. But I wonder where he got the sampling head.

John

I'm happy that Win got his 4192A. I've been struggling for forty years or thereabouts with an elderly Boonton 250B RX meter that is in its final death throes.

I can't afford a 4191A. Does anybody have a recommendation that will get me a decent RX or Q meter that will go to at least 300 MHz. with accuracy somewhere in the neighborhood of +/- 10% or so? I've been dicking around using known L and C and a grid (gate) dip meter that gets me in the ballpark for the last month or so, but it is getting tiring.

Suggestions?

Jim

I sure hope that's not a hijacked account... selling wildly unrelated items is a red flag.

-- jm

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Forgive my ignorance Win, what can it be used for ? Yes, the impedance over the frequency range. That means a oneport. With some effort it could play network analyzer...

Rene

I've only been had a couple times on ebay, one absolute deadbeat (sent her $25, never got the stuff) and one dead sampling head, $600, but the very fine print turned out to have said "as is" somewhere. Considering the price savings compared to an equipment broker, the risk is worth it.

John

They're cheap on eBay. These big instruments are rack mounted anyway, so the cable's stiffness is no big deal... I use an Agilent ethernet-to-GPIB bridge; a veritable pile of ieee-488 instruments can appear on the far side.

Hello Winfield,

Most of these are used in production and that's exactly how they operate them. I just wish they had put in a more practical port. Ok, maybe it was too early for Ethernet in those days. But at least a serial port. Even our logic analyzer which is way older has that. I hate those expensive GPIB cables that have the flexibility of a garden hose under pressure.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Winfield,

Here in the lab it is also kind of rack mounted but the cables are all in a 10" space between rack and wall. That gets full pretty quickly. Now that the 4191 needs service and has to be pulled it probably takes two minutes (and a Motrin for the resulting back ache) to pull but at least

Regards, Joerg

You can get away with a daisy chain of ordinary (34W?) IDC cable for most (moderate distance) applications.