[time-nuts] HP 5372A speed and stability

[Magnus Danielson]

On 04/15/2012 09:55 PM, Bob Camp wrote:
> HI
>
> Simple answer:
>
> It's a 200 ps (single shot) box. That makes it similar to a 53132, but not in the same league as a SR--620. Being as old as it is, some of the fancy math in a CNT-90 is not included with a 5372. Still a very useful box though.
>
> Normally you see them with a HP 10811. I don't think there were any other built in standards offered.

I agree fully with Bob here.

It's a 200 ps single shot resolution box, with the hardware prepared for 
100 ps upgrade of interpolator boards. It excels in being able to run 10 
MS/s or peak 13.3 MS/s rates until memory fills (8192 samples in total). 
It has a diversity of modes and I think it is unfair to say that it 
lacks fancy math compared to the CNT-90, as it has some stuff which the 
CNT-90 does not offer. Rather, they have different strengths.
Pendulum didn't want to bring some of the stuff into the CNT-90 as it 
would kill the market for their time software to run on the side.

The HP5372A is kind of nice even if I wish the user interface had some 
modern features.

The aim was really for jitter analysis of medium rate signals. It has 
some cool features for longer term stability, where the time deviation 
(not to be confused with the TDEV measure) is really handy.

I've got the -10 option for "C" channel, and the -40 option for FFT.

Cheers,
Magnus