Hi all,
?
Great thread, lots of useful info including suspected power supply issues on the A3.
?
I recently picked up an E5052A at auction. I've worked on similar era Agilent boxes but new to this model.?
Unit was sold has having a known issue on startup. There is a strange startup message which I believe is related to the A3 DSP board:
?
?
This happens on power up. The analyzer will then show the following runtime error and exit; it never makes it to the measurement screen:
?
?
The first few things I did was to backup the original HDD (20 GB Travelstar) and set that aside.?
?
I used the ghost factory backup image in the recovery partition to make a new hard drive, which booted just fine.?
?
Same error message on power up with original FW version 2.00. Updating to 2.51 does not change anything.
?
I'm convinced that the error "m_pA3drv -> Initialize()" is likely a hardware error, telling us that the A3 ADC/DSP board fails to initialize.?
This is only a guess; I see that jmr has disassembled the firmware. Your software skills are far superior to mine; maybe this error message makes more sense to you?
?
What I'm working on now is to make a wiring harness so I can extend the 3 x 32 (96 position) header for the A3 ADC/DSP.?
This way I can power the board outside of the chassis and check things like power supply rails, clock distribution for the ADCs and FPGAs.?
?
By the way, is the A3 board a huge hassle to remove for anyone else? The board is wedged extremely tight in my unit. I had to use a screwdriver to pry against the metal shield bolted to the board. I did it very carefully so no damage... it was impossible to remove otherwise.?
?
Giving the A3 a once over with shield removed, are a few CPLDs and a tssop FLASH chip, probably for the Sharc DSP. Hopefully its not a data corruption issue on one of these factory programmed devices...?
Kevin A.