Hi Ian,
many thanks for the warm welcome. Now it's over with being incognito ;-)
I'm trying to get into the high GHz field using high notch second hand HP equipment.
Here's my complete HP inventory for the records:
HP425A (excellent uV meter with valves, that I could rescue from junk and fix it successfully)
HP3430A (DVM, also rescued from junk, nice, but a bit bulky, not used lately)
HP34401A (impressive 6.5 digit multimeter, purchased recently)
HP8350B+HP83529A (cool sweeper 10MHz...20GHz, purchased recently. I'm using it a lot. Quite instructive to see how various coax cables behave at 18GHz.)
HP8593E (my latest purchase, 26.5GHz SA to replace a borrowed HP8591A).
I might need advice on the HP8593E soon when I have time to take care. I have the impression that the highest band (19GHz...26GHz) shows 10dB to low amplitudes, verified with the sweeper as signal source up to 20.4GHz and double-checked against a Gigatronics power meter, which nicely matches the HP83529A output power display within a few tenths of a dB). The noise floor of that band displays 5dB lower that that of the previous band. I would have expected it to be 5dB higher than that of the previous band as harmonic mixing gets increasingly less efficient at higher harmonics. I wonder if this can be fixed with a software setting.
Best regards,
Tom DG8SAQ
