[time-nuts] Re: Ref out on Keysight 53230A

[Bob Camp]

Hi

About as far as I can go on this one:

Early on TVB got ahold of an example of one of these. He did some testing and was 
not real excited by the results. He posted the info here on the list and most of us avoided 
the counters as a result. 

Eventually ( being the insane person that you all know me to be ) I gave one a try. The 
YouTube video roped me in :). What can I say? marketing works …. 

I dug into this and that. I duplicated (and improved on) the data in the video. The big issue 
seemed to be the Ref out. For me that was OK since I’m not going to daisy chain the units. 
They all will run on an external standard of some sort. Yes’ it’s a shame you can’t use that
OCXO in the counter ( if you got that option) for anything. The caution from TVB is spot
on in this respect. 

Best guess from looking at what’s going on: 

When they get done with a series of readings, the power demand drops abruptly. 
( = whatever it is does correlate with measurements ending). That load dump on 
the power supply / ground creates a bump somehow ( there’s none obvious, but
I’d bet there’s one there …). That dump puts a phase hit on the ref out. ( = Watch 
then ref out and you can see it has issues relative to ref in.)

So not very scientific. I dug in a bit, but didn’t find anything obvious. Since it was 
not a big deal for me, I stopped digging. 

Bob

> On Jan 19, 2023, at 2:10 PM, Hal Murray via time-nuts <time-nuts at lists.febo.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Bob Camp said:
>> The other rabbit hole involves the 5323x counters in general. Their ref out
>> ports have issues.  One could be a bit more descriptive, but this is a public
>> list.
> 
> What did they do wrong?  There must be an educational story behind that.
> 
> 
> -- 
> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
> 
> 
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