Remember the Boonton power meter I was talking about a while back?
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg3831494/#msg3831494I just got home with it today - it was given to me (as in free).
I guess he realized that whatever his inner gorilla wanted to do to it just wasn't going to work. Fortunately for the meter it's mine now.
But, he had another project that he wanted my opinion on. He got an active RF probe from an Ebay seller based in Ukraine, and had asked for a cable to connect it to a small audio amp. This is it -
eBay auction: #291998278881I knew before I went over there that the output probably wasn't an audio signal. However I brought him the BNC cable anyway. When I got there he gave me the Boonton meter and I asked him to show me the documentation for the RF probe. As I suspected, it simply acts as a buffer so you don't load the circuit you are probing. The output is the same RF signal but attenuated ~ 20 dB. It says to look at it on a spectrum analyzer or scope. Yep - see schematic. I told him that it wouldn't pass any audio signal out and he was kind of bummed, and wanted to give me that too!
I politely refused and just told him to experiment with it - it's legit and will display on the scope if the signal is low enough in freq. (the scope is 20 MHz) and high enough in amplitude. All is not lost. We'll see if he does anything. Maybe I'll get that too.
On to the Boonton ...
Well surprisingly it seems to work. Looks like it's been rode hard and put up wet, but it's displaying -3 dBm @ 50 MHz properly. The other ranges work too. Well except for one thing - it's got a really bad connection somewhere, and it won't work unless you the cable / sensor to lay just right sortof like the audiophiles have to lay down their speaker cable just so. I'll be getting into that this week and checking out the rest of the meter too. It's also missing a button, might see if an .stl is available or design one myself. I swear those buttons look like ones I've seen before on other equipment.
And cleaning it - I did a quick wipe down using Simple Green and what is that yellow/brownish tinge to the paper towel? Hmmm could it be ... no certainly not that.
We've got a lot of work to do out there people.