Agilent 8960 communications analyser teardown

[@Boyracer73]

I have spent quite a number of hours working with these while testing GSM/GPRS/EGPRS in Nokia. Good times :)

[@ChipGuy]

Those AMI chips could be the entire range of Profibus Interace IC's they made in the early 2000s. They did everything from GPIO, timers, A/D, D/A, even complete DAQ's with trigger and external SRAM storage. Datasheet were only available by signing NDA. Another one who made ASICs for Profibus was ST. Back then I worked with Profibus ISA interfaces, that's how I know. But since these chips only have the Agilent markings I am not sure.

[@ChipGuy]

On the other hand, AMI also bought parts of WSI from ST. They made those PLDs called "PSD". But mask programmed (MPSD). Could be those as well: matthieu.benoit.free.fr/cross/data_sheets/WSI_PSD.pdf

[@mikeselectricstuff]

PSDs were only peripherals, don't think they were useable standalone. Interesting the range of packages, also lack of a crystal next to any of them

[@ChipGuy]

Lack of crystal is a good point.

[@electronicbob6237]

You forgot the first rule ,when you open things like that ...the sacrifice for the RF Woodo God.....

[@MaxKoschuh]

long time no see, Mike I'm glad you are back

[@PakRepairer24]

Thanks for sharing the tear down. It was very informative and interesting! One video and I learn much. Thank for putting the effort and time in. Great videos. (system config screen). user calibration summary. license status details. installed R2C license enables access to all installed R2C-licensed functionality. =setting =(Measurement / instrument screen) Auto generator. downlink traffic power please one video for all these issues

[@cspower7259]

One video and I learn much. Thank for putting the effort and time in. Great videos.

[@DextersTechLab]

Cracking video Mike, thanks for taking the time out to make one, we had been missing you!

[@Wimpzilla]

Hello Mike! Thanks for sharing, nice video as always very instructive. The RF goodness praise you and being appeased!

[@AureliusR]

Was hoping to see a comment from Shahriar on here! He could probably explain a lot of the things that confuse us mere mortals. (:

[@MrDubje]

The PCB wall has to be extended now, I think! Funny you mention that about the RoHS at 0:50 , Keysight has this notice on their site for the 3458A multimeter: Notice for European Union Customers: This non-RoHS product has been placed on the market prior to the compliance deadline and continues to be made available on the EU market under product numbers EU3458A / EU3458AX. Please contact Keysight Sales for quotation and ordering. Keysight will continue service and support for this product throughout worldwide support life. So, when the product is still currently being sold, they can. I wonder if they have to comply to the new rules when they upgrade the revision or something...

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Pity I don't have enough wall space

[@MrDubje]

The outside of your house, haha. as "Christmas decoration".

[@AureliusR]

At 26:00 ish, those are not LM358, they are LM35D, temperature sensors, presumably to make sure the amplifiers/oscillators are temperature compensated? Or something like that?

[@vincei4252]

Great teardown, Mike. It's a shame to see all that work and technology end up on a scrap heap. Agree that the only thing that seemed worth salvaging without a lot of pain is the TCXO.

[@MrDubje]

I'm nitpicking, but that is an OCXO, a TCXO has no oven. :)

[@bongolongoallthetime]

Those chips are actually LM35 temperature sensors, and that's why they are thermally coupled to the golden custom ICs

[@MarkTillotson]

At 21:56 that device is perhaps just a high power RF attenuator pad, same construction as dummy loads I've seen. Probably to both protect the input and to protect against high VSWR on the output, or perhaps to protect against backwards power. Would make sense to allow that connector to directly handle a transceiver's antenna connection.

[@jingweiren4942]

I once developed thing this box. It's very nice time to work with those spokane folks!

[@web1bastler]

Yay, new video! That truly is a ton of boards! It would have been interesting to see what the PC/104 module spews out over serial. Anyways, Merry Christmas!

[@mikeselectricstuff]

I did but forgot to include it - not at all interesting though. No OS, BIOS or boot info just application name etc.

[@ollieb9875]

Good production value.. I enjoyed this video thank you. Nice microscope. Have a good new year!

[@IsaacClodfelter]

Thanks for sharing the tear down. It was very informative and interesting!

[@thomasguilder9288]

The large flanged device on the N port is most likely an attenuatur to prevent the unit from too much input power, as on signal generators.

[@FllashLight]

Christmas a bit late this year, but worth waiting :D

[@FireballXL55]

Hi Mike at 26:00 you talked about LM358 which I did not see but I could see LM35D precision centigrade temperature sensors.

[@douro20]

That VME single-board computer might be worth something. I found that some of those custom Agilent RF parts are actually available on demo boards.

[@ZoidTechnology]

You say it's only 2.5 GHz, but I would have at least sacrificed an inductor just to be safe.

[@mc_cpu]

Enjoyed seeing inside the RF relay.

[@GerardHook]

I’m pretty sure the card at 45:44 is the same as one in your sig gen tear down. Wouldn’t surprise me to see them re use bits.

[@poptartmcjelly7054]

I think the LCD could probably be re-used along with maybe the single board computers if you can get them to display anything. One fun thing i think would be getting the pentium4 SBC to work and comparing it to maybe a raspberry pi in terms of performance.

[@commonmogoreanu7135]

Thank you! Very informative, as always.

[@agoodm]

I'd love to try and recover the data from that HDD and make a video of it...

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Doubt it would be very interesting - just and OS and the test application. Might try to find a sector editor that can read it

[@YouTubeSupportTeams]

please do and post a video. would be very interesting

[@admiralxxx7906]

Please too!

[@tabajaralabs]

@@mikeselectricstuff My HDD is fried, it would be nice if you could image this HDD and share the results =) Although 4 years later I bet this HDD went to the trash :\

[@sethalump]

Picked up one of these for $85 after some drunken Ebay time. Good to see I'll have something fun to scrap if it doesn't do much for me.

[@Psi105]

Will be a non-tiny amount of gold in that pile of PCBs. Usually RF gear is much better than normal Ewaste for gold recovery. Mostly thick bond wires and gold braid inside some types of IC's. The gold plating is often hard gold too, instead of worthless ENIG. Checkout "Successful Engineer" channel

[@khronscave]

26:00 Those actually look like LM35DM, which Google says are precision temperature sensors. Makes a bit more sense, them being right up against those metal-canned SOIC chips...

[@pixelflow]

If you check out page 69 of this old 1997 HP Journal they go into the LCD shielding/gasket stuff www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1997-04.pdf

[@network_king]

That big parallel connector sort of looks like could be SCSI?

[@AlexPlusLEDS]

Mike, any helpful links on VME stuff? Kinda hard for me to find good documentation! Thanks In advance!

[@meepk633]

Seems mighty complicated. Could a lot of that functionality be done in software now?

[@AureliusR]

Probably yes, but they would still do much of it in hardware just for the speed and precision. The RF/cellular devs like their hardware :^)

[@douro20]

Was this made in the UK? I ask because Anite was a UK company before Agilent bought them.

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Some of the RF modules are. I suspect Anite is the software framework

[@douro20]

Anite also built complete instruments.

[@MichelPASTOR]

Impressive device. Very interesting !

[@0xbenedikt]

The UI looks lovely :)

[@NurdRage777]

Hey Mike. The back of the device had a VGA out. Could you maybe try to figure out if that's somehow connected to the Pentium 4 computer board and try to power it up? That would be cool :)

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Didn't check but pretty sure this would be a duplicate of the main screen.

[@rkan2]

Probably just an external output for the already displayed lcd that is on the device though.

[@NurdRage777]

mikeselectricstuff alright. Thanks for the teardown. I like this. Reverse engineering is also cool to see :)

[@Muonium1]

do a MRI teardown! if you get to the hospital before the bin man gets there on garbage day they leave the old used ones by the dumpster around the back.

[@justinlynn]

those sliprings though!

[@Muonium1]

those are only on ct scanners

[@Arnthorg]

tesla500 might do it one day.

[@Blowcrafter]

i actually found an old one on ebay recently... but it was way to expensive for me to buy

[@Landrew0]

"Stupid lead-free" indeed. Imaginary hazards do not create risks.

[@008626]

I like the TO metal can package RF relays

[@RWBHere]

Solder is quite resistive at microwave frequencies. Gold is a much better conductor, and because of the skin effect, the gold is left bare on that screen.

[@Sixta16]

Those were not LM358 but LM35D Mike!

[@jaycee1980]

yep and thats what had the little metal strips across. So i guess they were temperature sensing those little gold modules for calibration purposes

[@OneBiOzZ]

Those beads on the RF front end looks like part of a directional coupler ... i have never seen one like that on a PCB directly

[@Sixta16]

I think that is quite common construction of wide band couplers actually.

[@OneBiOzZ]

its not an uncommon construction for 500+mhz, just not all that common (at least in my own experience) to see one placed on PCB directly and not in a module, normally PCB wideband directional couplers for this frequency range (again in my experience) are the transformer/autotransformer type i dont do RF stuff for work or anything so im not all that sure what the benefits of each type are

[@thomasguilder9288]

Alyx BioHaz at least one of them was definitely a directional coupler, you could see the connections from shield and center pin.

[@fromfin90]

i wonder where that QR code looking sticker on the oscillator later in the video would have shown..

[@tbbw]

That's a lot of golden chips and plating... i wonder just how much gold they threw at that thing.

[@worroSfOretsevraH]

I definitely would salvage all those tantalum caps.

[@russ18uk]

Wow it's still Christmas!

[@RicoElectrico]

54:55 "custom jobies" sounds familiar ;)

[@unmanaged]

so is that why usb port pins on the ends are longer than the center pins for hot swap... ?

[@bvs1q]

yep, and or generally every connector that exists has the ground contact first for signal stability and safety and etc many reasons

[@joakiml8226]

I have one at home, love to swap it for a Stabilock

[@Razor2048]

I wonder why Agilent didn't find an additional use for them, for example, they could have sold off the remaining stock for like $100 each, and then included some kind of transceiver board that would allow it to function as a cell service booster if you are in an area with poor coverage. This may have given it a second life as a general consumer device, especially if it could be adjusted by the user to support different bands and service types.

[@TheSenorTuco]

Bit disappointed, I was already expecting in the end of video you will pull of your magic and have that intel board running with video :D or something. Still superb teardown

[@pufferfish0101]

how much for the lcd sent to AUS? if you are interested

[@farhadali7690]

Informative video.Need one solution regarding this tester,We have purchased Agilent Wireless tester E5515C it has issue of restarting continuously after this text "Start DSP boot initialization".Does anyone know about this issue and how to rectify it.I would be very thankful

[@toastedcrumpets]

I have the same problem! The trouble shooting manual on the keysight website (near the end of the list) suggests checking the serial log from the device and gives instructions on how to do this

[@yumiwatanabe440]

please do teardown of cellular base station ! please ! please ! please ! every time i see those i'm so desperate to look what's inside ;)

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Me too - someone send me one!

[@electronash]

mikeselectricstuff Great vid, Mike. ;) Do you possibly still have any of the boards from this? I might be interested in any of the higher speed ADC / DAC chips. (I'm in the UK, and bought a PM tube from your eBay a few years ago.) Not a great deal inside a cellular / mobile base station tbh. Usually far simpler than what we've seen here... I worked in various telecoms factories over the years, on 4G / LTE test boxes etc., and that was just a single board in a 1U rack, with a Spartan 6, small DIMM PPC module that ran bare-bones Linux, and some parallel ADCs / DACs. They didn't even roll their own core for the LTE / CDMA / CIPRI stuff, they just used the Xilinx IP cores. The Wimax device was very similar, but was mast-mount (48V, or PoE, IIRC), and had a large RF power amp block. The cast alu chassis had heatsink fins, and the PA bolted to the inside of that. Would still be very interesting to see a teardown of an actual base station though, as the racks I worked on were essentially the test and setup reference standards. Especially interesting if it's older stuff, like this analyser. The one I used in 2011 looked almost identical to this, but was PC-based, and we played the Win 98 Pinball game and DOOM on it. lol

[@theEngineer8141]

Sir I have one problem my tester 8960 series 10 E5515c Error- E1987A A . 13 . 16 NON-revoverable error Hoe resolv this error

[@SidneyCritic]

It's like when that Ytube guy scraps $10M servers after 8 years, such a waste but what can you do when it's not usefully any more.

[@chuckjoine9716]

I hava a cmu200 10mhz-2.7Ghz but how to out low band?

[@evghenim1955]

I like it how you needed that much of meat to run GPRS back in the days and now, as I heard, you can run LTE on a laptop with an sdr... bellard.org/lte/

[@IsettasRock]

Throw all the remains into a box and mail it to me!

[@AxelWerner]

That was all interesting... But Can It Run Crysis?

[@johnpossum556]

Good video but it could be a smidge louder.

[@solidamber]

what is it?

[@thcoura]

Would be funny to drop a cell phone inside this "cage" and try to call back the phone

[@thomasnixon4440]

50:51 megawat!

[@vinny142]

Now put it back together.

[@Whatsthegeek]

nice ! It's a pitty you destroyed some of the components for the sake of the teardown :D

[@Falcrist]

666th view. I hope you had a happy winter solstice!

[@Получитпопопе]

да и этому видео тоже

[@drjmansplace5174]

AMI could be American Megatrends Inc. AMD's old name.

[@aserta]

More RF black magic!

[@thcoura]

Mike, you shake the camera too much. it's hard to understand what are you showing

[@TheShivABC]

Or Play doom on it :D

[@TheShivABC]

Install windows on it and try to run crysis lol

[@resonantconsciousness9248]

R.F nonsense, haha.

[@darekcz]

Нахуя ты всё ломаешь?

[@yumiwatanabe440]

не ломает а смотрит что внутри !

[@darekcz]

Именно ломает, он разобрал кучу дорогих приборов варварским методом, после таких - "что внутри", всё можно смело выкидывать в мусор.

[@vel6975]

@@darekcz - если честно, то этот тестер почти не жалко. ;) Вещь, которую заточили настолько узкоспециализированно, что кроме тестирования телефонов на производстве она особо и не пригодня ни для чего. Ну, почти...

[@peterperkon5098]

Cannot tolerate the shaking, the out of focus blurriness and the overall mumbling on this one. Sad :(

[@AureliusR]

Sad because you missed out on a great video. I don't understand why people say Mike is hard to understand, maybe it's because I'm not a Yank... but I have ZERO trouble understanding him. Also, I tend to dislike the moving camera shots too, they make me nauseous, but I usually just change tabs or close my eyes and listen. This is Mike's style and I doubt he'd change it for the world.

[@gotj]

First !

[@joeambly6807]

Thanks for the useless comment

[@gotj]

To you too

[@vincei4252]

second?