I just purchased a BB60C with a VSG25A vector generator; this video does a great job of presenting many of the features of the analyzer. I feel all ready to go in using these devices as part of an evaluation process for several next-generation RF products.
Your exposition of the systems and the experiments is so good I watch every second of these videos. Thank you for creating and maintaining such a high quality channel dedicated to instrumentation.
Well done Shariar There are a few videos on youtube about the RSA-306. Your side by side comparison with the Signalhound is the most comprehensive. I had the opportunity to participate in on of Tektronix Seminars of the 306 last month in the SF Bay Area. Both units are very impressive. Thanks for the info you furnished at the beginning of the video about Tek improving the performance of the 306 to reduce the internally generated spurious outputs. Thanks again
Brilliant, I'm very Impressed how you turned the Review into a tutorials. Many thanks for sharing and keep the long videos they always worth every second.
Once again thank you for a very well done video. I love the experiments. You have presented a very complete review and comparison of two amazing devices. Keep up the great work.
Great review as always! Considering build quality, both of the SH cases is actually off the shelf hammond aluminium 1455 series. I've used them lot, finish is much better than any chinease cases i've seen.
A really very good demonstration of the BB60C. Do you also have a video to demonstrate a precompliment measurement for a contacted radiation between 9kHz or 150KHz and 30MHz?
Excellent video! I especially liked the analysis of the frequency hopping wireless link, very cool stuff. Planning to do a video with that rubidium standard any time soon?
The BB60C will have a lockable USB 3.0 connector in the very near future. Free software is at V3.10 now and rapidly improving with bug fixes and new features.
Hi Shariar,I have both a BB60C and RSA306. Conversely to yours, my BB60C has screw thread USB3 connector and my RSA306 does not.I used a SH VSG25A to feed a pulsed signal to both analysers in real time mode and reduced the pulse width. The BB60C worked well but the RSA306 seemed abysmal being almost unusable below 500us pulse width. Did you mention that a firmware update is available for the RSA306, or is there some setting in Signal Vu that emables real-time mode?Regards,AndyP.S. Enjoyed the video!
Great video. I was considering the Rigol DSA815-TG 1.5 GHz spectrum analyzer, but the specs of these PC-connected units appear (to my untrained eye) to be vastly superior. Am I missing something; does the DSA815-TG have any advantages to justify the equal cost for 1.5 GHz (compared to the 4.4 GHz Signal Hound USB-SA44B + USB-TG44A)? And what about the PC vs standalone device question? With oscilloscopes, the interactivity and speed of custom-layed out physical knobs is considered by many to be critical for usability. Is the spectrum analyzer workflow typically so different that this isn't true? (Seems plausible to me that there's less "hunting for a signal" with an SA compared to an oscilloscope, nevertheless curious to hear your thoughts).
TheHue's SciTech Hi man, i would like to see your question answered as i´m with the same doubt ... for sure usb3.0 is a great improvement for the bb60c Model, but they use usb2.0 in full speed 480MB/s for the rest of the models.EEVBLOG has a thread with the same question i´ll take a look there..
Very impressive and detailed review! Thank you so much! It seems the BB60C is a pretty good choice! I wonder if the developers can calibrate in software to make the noise floor flat. Even though for high-signal measurement it's not a big deal, it just looks bad :(
Thank you for your effort! Could you calibrate tracking generator on highest output power level, disconnect it from analyzer and connect to 50 ohm terminator. Then after one hour connect it again do analyzer and check if the generator is stable.
I have R&S Spectrum analyser which does not have tracking gen installed. I am wondering if that Signal Hound tracking gen provides any suitable trigger output so that it can be used as tracking gen for other spectrum analysers? I am not sure exactly but I have feeling that tracking gen need to generate series of pulses to spectrum analyser - one for each step during frequency sweep?
Question for you: I have MDO3000x spectrum analyzer, and i need to measure returned signal, to make very best GPS/GSM antenna inside car (that means, i will tune it to match by bands based on surroundings) I don't have any RF or TG generators, how can i do this measurement ? Is it possible to make very flat noise generator, if yes, how ? Tutorial would be nice :)
Linas K It is definitely possible to make broadband noise sources, it should make an interesting tutorial. It is possible to also use the antenna as a load of an oscillator and depending on the oscillator frequency estimate the tuned frequency of the antenna.
well, TG is variable frequency oscillator ( so it defeats the purpose of simplicity of measurement). It would be nice to have Mhz-Ghz range flat non DAC based noise source
Linas K What I meant was to use the antenna as a "load" of an oscillator that you can build. The oscillator's center frequency will be affected by the antenna and you can measure the center frequency with a spectrum analyzer. A broadband noise source would also be good of course, it doesn't necessarily have to have a flat response as you will calibrate that out during measurement.
The Signal Path Blog Problem with that is i need at least few different oscillators at various frequencys to do test. SIM7100C does have quite a list of bands that can work, and making new oscillator for each will be expensive. And because MDO3000 is more like FFT based spectrum analyzer, it could take amplified white noise as TG replacment. Maybe it is a good idea to take few 10GHz opamps, and do amplification of high value resistor signal, that is heated by passing current. cascade them, and AC couple them together in series. Maybe you would like to try ?
For some reason it is not possible to view your channel from within the Apple TV youtube application in my experience. Whenever I try to select your channel from my subscriptions list on Apple TV it says UA-cam is not available. No other channel has ever given me this problem but your channel always has. Not sure if this is useful information but I thought I'd pass it along since I cannot see any reason why this would be the case on my end.
well, it is possible that your audience is interested in really high frequency stuff. i dont't know. nevertheless, and just my 2c, your videos should be way shorter, tipically under 30 min's, to grab more attention. No hard feelings Appreciate what you're doing
John Smith Ah, no. I am fairly sure these videos are not intended for the attention-deficit-afflicted hipster sipping on foamed coffee between meetings on the 40th floor. It would be tragic indeed if the content were emasculated in the interest of further enabling such a disorder. These videos are the ones you make as much time for as is needed, and to which you give the required attention in the comfort of your easy chair. Anyway, I checked and you're wrong. During the first year, the videos were mostly around 15 minutes duration, but in the three years since the typical length has been between 40 and 80 minutes, with a few around 30-35 minutes and one video weighing in at a bit over 2 hours. That video is Teardown, Analysis and Repair of an Agilent E4407B 26.5GHz ESA-E Spectrum Analyzer. It was uploaded in October, and in what I have seen of the comments on the page, there is nothing but praise for the quality and thoroughness of the presentation. When civilization collapses and we are returned to the wilderness, it is Shahriar and the very few like him that will restore some sort of technological basis for rebuilding. The rest of us (those who survive) will bring offerings of meat and fruit and what we hope are spectrum analyzers to The Great Shahriar. We will build his complex of labs; we will protect him and his instruments from invading marauders; we will defend his stores of electronic components. It is people with attention spans that have made the lives we enjoy possible. If everyone's attention span was measured in UA-cam time, we would still be in the caves. My own suggestion is to let the videos find their own lengths and not fight it.
John Smith I appreciate the feedback John. If you look at my the number of views (and likes) on my videos, the strongest correlation isn't with length, but rather with the type of material. The more basic tutorials get the most views and that makes sense of course. For example if I make a video about RC filters, it will have much more views than a video about optical modulation schemes. However, I have aimed my channel to be geared toward material that often isn't available on UA-cam even if it means less views. If I made my channel about blowing up capacitors and resistors it would have even more views! Back on your point, I will try to make some shorter videos as well, probably around the 30min mark and see what happens.
Why are all tracking generators amplitude accuracy is terrible. This unit is +/-2dB which is very bad. It would be totally useless when you want to find -3dB point of a filter for example. Why tracking generators' amplitude accuracy is generally bad?
Please note that the accuracy is not necessary as long as it is not huge. In order to measure the -3dB bandwidth one would normalize the response using a through and therefore performing a relative measurement. Amplitude accuracy would be helpful when using the TG as a synthesizer.
Thanks for your response. However, it's important to know how the normalization is implemented internally in the spectrum analyzer. I have no idea how it's implemented. If it's a purely software thing the normalization proccess would still be a huge problem for active devices. For example, due to poor amplitude accuracy of the track gen an amplifier might work outside of the linear region when it's not supposed to or vice versa. This wouldn't be a problem for passive circuits. I don't know if the spectrum analyzer "fine-tunes" the tracking generator output after normalization in hardware. Do you know anything about it?
Alperen Akküncü The normalization is done purely in software. This is why I mentioned that as long as it is not too large then it is Ok. For active devices a few dB would be acceptable as long as the user ensures the input and output powers are well below the P1dB of the DUT. Somewhere in one of my spectrum analyzer reviews I do perform compression measurements using a TG.
Thanks for the response once again. So it's not safe to chracterize an active instrument using powers close to the P1DB point of the DUT then. Do you know if it's possible to use an external RF generator as tracking generator?
It is safe to do, but it won't give you the small-signal gain of the DUT. You can use an external synthesizer as a tracking generator if you like. Either software controlled (slow) or hardware controlled if the instrument supports it. In my Keysight EXA review I show this capability of the EXA + MXG.
Amazing, detailed review as always. Really appreciate the side by side comparison.
Afrotechmods You are welcome. :)
I just purchased a BB60C with a VSG25A vector generator; this video does a great job of presenting many of the features of the analyzer. I feel all ready to go in using these devices as part of an evaluation process for several next-generation RF products.
Your exposition of the systems and the experiments is so good I watch every second of these videos. Thank you for creating and maintaining such a high quality channel dedicated to instrumentation.
Thanks a lot for a comprehensive review. BB60C is amazingly complete , especially considering the cost.
Well done Shariar There are a few videos on youtube about the RSA-306. Your side by side comparison with the Signalhound is the most comprehensive. I had the opportunity to participate in on of Tektronix Seminars of the 306 last month in the SF Bay Area. Both units are very impressive. Thanks for the info you furnished at the beginning of the video about Tek improving the performance of the 306 to reduce the internally generated spurious outputs. Thanks again
Thank You for presenting these products I was considering purchasing one of these.
Brilliant, I'm very Impressed how you turned the Review into a tutorials.
Many thanks for sharing and keep the long videos they always worth every second.
Once again thank you for a very well done video. I love the experiments. You have presented a very complete review and comparison of two amazing devices. Keep up the great work.
Great review as always!
Considering build quality, both of the SH cases is actually off the shelf hammond aluminium 1455 series.
I've used them lot, finish is much better than any chinease cases i've seen.
Thanks for another great video. I know I'm a bit late to the game on this but your work is appreciated.
Amazing eye candy, as always. Please do continue doing advanced stuff, thank you!
Wonderful e very detailed presentation! Thanks a lot for your big effort.
A really very good demonstration of the BB60C. Do you also have a video to demonstrate a precompliment measurement for a contacted radiation between 9kHz or 150KHz and 30MHz?
Excellent video! I especially liked the analysis of the frequency hopping wireless link, very cool stuff.
Planning to do a video with that rubidium standard any time soon?
The BB60C will have a lockable USB 3.0 connector in the very near future. Free software is at V3.10 now and rapidly improving with bug fixes and new features.
Hi Shariar,I have both a BB60C and RSA306. Conversely to yours, my BB60C has screw thread USB3 connector and my RSA306 does not.I used a SH VSG25A to feed a pulsed signal to both analysers in real time mode and reduced the pulse width. The BB60C worked well but the RSA306 seemed abysmal being almost unusable below 500us pulse width. Did you mention that a firmware update is available for the RSA306, or is there some setting in Signal Vu that emables real-time mode?Regards,AndyP.S. Enjoyed the video!
Great video. I was considering the Rigol DSA815-TG 1.5 GHz spectrum analyzer, but the specs of these PC-connected units appear (to my untrained eye) to be vastly superior. Am I missing something; does the DSA815-TG have any advantages to justify the equal cost for 1.5 GHz (compared to the 4.4 GHz Signal Hound USB-SA44B + USB-TG44A)?
And what about the PC vs standalone device question? With oscilloscopes, the interactivity and speed of custom-layed out physical knobs is considered by many to be critical for usability. Is the spectrum analyzer workflow typically so different that this isn't true? (Seems plausible to me that there's less "hunting for a signal" with an SA compared to an oscilloscope, nevertheless curious to hear your thoughts).
TheHue's SciTech Hi man, i would like to see your question answered as i´m with the same doubt ... for sure usb3.0 is a great improvement for the bb60c Model, but they use usb2.0 in full speed 480MB/s for the rest of the models.EEVBLOG has a thread with the same question i´ll take a look there..
Very impressive and detailed review! Thank you so much!
It seems the BB60C is a pretty good choice! I wonder if the developers can calibrate in software to make the noise floor flat. Even though for high-signal measurement it's not a big deal, it just looks bad :(
Thank you!!. Really very useful.
Thank you for your effort!
Could you calibrate tracking generator on highest output power level, disconnect it from analyzer and connect to 50 ohm terminator. Then after one hour connect it again do analyzer and check if the generator is stable.
I have R&S Spectrum analyser which does not have tracking gen installed. I am wondering if that Signal Hound tracking gen provides any suitable trigger output so that it can be used as tracking gen for other spectrum analysers? I am not sure exactly but I have feeling that tracking gen need to generate series of pulses to spectrum analyser - one for each step during frequency sweep?
Excellent
What a great Video, Thanks :)
Nice review
Thank you.
Can you please state which coupler you used for the antenna measurement.
What are the laptops that you're using in this video? :)
Could I use this to tune a duplexer or the front end of a receiver?
Excellent video as always! You just turned my day from complete crap to not so bad :)
👍👍
Question for you:
I have MDO3000x spectrum analyzer, and i need to measure returned signal, to make very best GPS/GSM antenna inside car (that means, i will tune it to match by bands based on surroundings)
I don't have any RF or TG generators, how can i do this measurement ? Is it possible to make very flat noise generator, if yes, how ?
Tutorial would be nice :)
Linas K It is definitely possible to make broadband noise sources, it should make an interesting tutorial. It is possible to also use the antenna as a load of an oscillator and depending on the oscillator frequency estimate the tuned frequency of the antenna.
well, TG is variable frequency oscillator ( so it defeats the purpose of simplicity of measurement). It would be nice to have Mhz-Ghz range flat non DAC based noise source
Linas K What I meant was to use the antenna as a "load" of an oscillator that you can build. The oscillator's center frequency will be affected by the antenna and you can measure the center frequency with a spectrum analyzer. A broadband noise source would also be good of course, it doesn't necessarily have to have a flat response as you will calibrate that out during measurement.
The Signal Path Blog
Problem with that is i need at least few different oscillators at various frequencys to do test. SIM7100C does have quite a list of bands that can work, and making new oscillator for each will be expensive. And because MDO3000 is more like FFT based spectrum analyzer, it could take amplified white noise as TG replacment.
Maybe it is a good idea to take few 10GHz opamps, and do amplification of high value resistor signal, that is heated by passing current. cascade them, and AC couple them together in series. Maybe you would like to try ?
Hi, Would it be possible to use the TG44A with a generic SA (for instance a Tek RSA306)?
For some reason it is not possible to view your channel from within the Apple TV youtube application in my experience. Whenever I try to select your channel from my subscriptions list on Apple TV it says UA-cam is not available. No other channel has ever given me this problem but your channel always has. Not sure if this is useful information but I thought I'd pass it along since I cannot see any reason why this would be the case on my end.
CAHSR2020 Thanks. I have no idea why this would be... :( I'll try to look into it.
how to measure s21 with signal hound?
Your white balance is a bit off, everything's yellow :)
well, it is possible that your audience is interested in really high frequency stuff.
i dont't know.
nevertheless, and just my 2c, your videos should be way shorter, tipically under 30 min's, to grab more attention.
No hard feelings
Appreciate what you're doing
John Smith No, his videos should be long. You can't skip the parts you don't want to watch, but as a viewer you can't un-cut-out content.
bgdwiepp
totally agree...
that's why I skip his videos more often, as he is making them longer and longer
John Smith Ah, no. I am fairly sure these videos are not intended for the attention-deficit-afflicted hipster sipping on foamed coffee between meetings on the 40th floor. It would be tragic indeed if the content were emasculated in the interest of further enabling such a disorder. These videos are the ones you make as much time for as is needed, and to which you give the required attention in the comfort of your easy chair.
Anyway, I checked and you're wrong. During the first year, the videos were mostly around 15 minutes duration, but in the three years since the typical length has been between 40 and 80 minutes, with a few around 30-35 minutes and one video weighing in at a bit over 2 hours.
That video is Teardown, Analysis and Repair of an Agilent E4407B 26.5GHz ESA-E Spectrum Analyzer. It was uploaded in October, and in what I have seen of the comments on the page, there is nothing but praise for the quality and thoroughness of the presentation.
When civilization collapses and we are returned to the wilderness, it is Shahriar and the very few like him that will restore some sort of technological basis for rebuilding. The rest of us (those who survive) will bring offerings of meat and fruit and what we hope are spectrum analyzers to The Great Shahriar. We will build his complex of labs; we will protect him and his instruments from invading marauders; we will defend his stores of electronic components.
It is people with attention spans that have made the lives we enjoy possible. If everyone's attention span was measured in UA-cam time, we would still be in the caves. My own suggestion is to let the videos find their own lengths and not fight it.
John Smith I appreciate the feedback John. If you look at my the number of views (and likes) on my videos, the strongest correlation isn't with length, but rather with the type of material. The more basic tutorials get the most views and that makes sense of course. For example if I make a video about RC filters, it will have much more views than a video about optical modulation schemes. However, I have aimed my channel to be geared toward material that often isn't available on UA-cam even if it means less views. If I made my channel about blowing up capacitors and resistors it would have even more views!
Back on your point, I will try to make some shorter videos as well, probably around the 30min mark and see what happens.
pillsnotbills Haha! Thanks for the unexpected conclusion of your comment. Made my morning!
Why are all tracking generators amplitude accuracy is terrible. This unit is +/-2dB which is very bad. It would be totally useless when you want to find -3dB point of a filter for example. Why tracking generators' amplitude accuracy is generally bad?
Please note that the accuracy is not necessary as long as it is not huge. In order to measure the -3dB bandwidth one would normalize the response using a through and therefore performing a relative measurement. Amplitude accuracy would be helpful when using the TG as a synthesizer.
Thanks for your response. However, it's important to know how the normalization is implemented internally in the spectrum analyzer. I have no idea how it's implemented. If it's a purely software thing the normalization proccess would still be a huge problem for active devices. For example, due to poor amplitude accuracy of the track gen an amplifier might work outside of the linear region when it's not supposed to or vice versa. This wouldn't be a problem for passive circuits. I don't know if the spectrum analyzer "fine-tunes" the tracking generator output after normalization in hardware. Do you know anything about it?
Alperen Akküncü The normalization is done purely in software. This is why I mentioned that as long as it is not too large then it is Ok. For active devices a few dB would be acceptable as long as the user ensures the input and output powers are well below the P1dB of the DUT. Somewhere in one of my spectrum analyzer reviews I do perform compression measurements using a TG.
Thanks for the response once again. So it's not safe to chracterize an active instrument using powers close to the P1DB point of the DUT then. Do you know if it's possible to use an external RF generator as tracking generator?
It is safe to do, but it won't give you the small-signal gain of the DUT. You can use an external synthesizer as a tracking generator if you like. Either software controlled (slow) or hardware controlled if the instrument supports it. In my Keysight EXA review I show this capability of the EXA + MXG.
Surface?? UGH!