Rohde Schwarz ZVR VNA repair

[rtekal]

Hi

I have a ZVK in which the front panel doesn't work. On remote the instrument responds. I saw the Operating and Service manual, but could not find the parts list. Anyone having the parts list, please share.

Regards
T N Ramesh

[Georg - PY5ZSE]

nearly a year after the last posts (including mine) I am finally in the hot phase of my ZVCE's repair. The "preliminaries" which cost me a lot of time were repairing the power supply, which was not only faulty, but literally destroyed. It consists of a main board and 3 subassemblies, and each of them had a fault - independent from each other. The only explanation is that it was sitting in a repair shop, used as a source of spares. The broken parts went back into the case.

Now the unit is booting from a CF, DOS and RTOS are coming up, then it reports "booting Transputers" and hangs. It writes log files onto the hard disk (i.e. the CF), confirming that there is a problem with transputer(s) - timing out. Unfortunately, no more information. Possible causes are, according to the service manual, software, the CPU board, the graphics board and the Measurement Control Unit or MCU board. These are the only ones that have transputers on them.

I swapped the CPU and Graphics with boards from a FSEK spectrum analyzer, which are identical. Same behaviour. I also tried 3 different CF's, to no avail. Btw., it seems to be not too picky about CF cards, from Transcend CF170 to consumer grade Sandisk Extreme and Ultra everything behaves the same.

There is a R&S utility called GR_CHECK.EXE which checks the links to the various transputers one by one and reports it's findings. I need it urgently, so if anyone on the board has it sitting around on his hard drive...

Regards
ghieber

[rogersstuart]

I was able to purchase a R&S ZVM without a hard drive. It was pretty cheap and seemed worth a shot. The only issues are that the auxiliary inputs b1 and b2 are bent downwards (at least 20 degrees) and the encoder is very stiff. I suspect that the main ports are slightly bent too (maybe 1mm arc) but this thing is built like a tank and I don't think I have the tools or skills required to repair the metal.

I tried a few things mentioned in this topic. The basic CF adapter w/ Transcend 8GB card worked well in my unit. I was able to boot off the image provided in the last file share that was posted but I was unsuccessful at converting it to a ZVM. When I tried the firmware app would lock up and complain about a C file. I contacted R&S and they sent me a Norton Ghost image. It was a bit of trouble getting it to work. I had to install XP in a virtual machine, image a vmdk, and then use the vmdk to image the CF card. When I tried to image the CF directly (connected to an IDE adapter) Norton Ghost would hang at around 96-98% and the CF would boot to various errors. After booting a good image I added all the option keys and then followed the guide in the manual for post hard drive replacement configuration. It seems like it works fine now.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QxPTX2F3NxBDY_pR93ZMYV2Ptf0mhqyq

[s_smart1]

thanks for all the information about the repair of a ZVR. My own unit came back from Rohde after a factory calibration with a broken HDD, two broken sectors, so I tried to replace the HDD with a CF card. First I created an image with HDD Raw Copy.
I started with a normal 4GB CF card, and had to learn that there is a differences between CF cards some reports the bios they are removable and other that they are fixed disks. So I change the CF card to an industry Transcend CF card with 8GB. At the beginning it seemed to work, but sometimes I got write errors. So I tried to get into the Bios of my ZVR, but the CTRL-ALT-ESC did not work.
My Bios has version 2.1 and here I had to use CTRL-ALT-E. If you power up the unit with pressed “BACK” it shows you for a short time the key combination for the bios. I had to try it several time to get into the bios and here I saw that the CF card was detected but the calculated MB number was false. So I tried a industry CF Card with 1GB. Now the Unit works as expected. 

[Jarek]

 Hello
 I have ZVCE without a disk. I made a copy from Georg's- PY5ZSE file .
My ZVCE worked but as ZVR 4GHz ? Of course with errors due to different model.
Do you have another ZVCE disk image?

[Jarek]

Hello
I don't need anymore. I made a copy on CF. ZVCE turns on.
There are still problems with port 1, I don't know what is broken yet.