Anritsu - EEPROM reading/writing (S/N, Model ID, Options, etc.)

[tv84]

I've came across some infos about models/options on Anritsu devices, that I would like to share just to provide some reference for all.

Maybe this is common knowledge but nonetheless...

AFAIK the device EEPROM contains, among other things, the active options bitmasks which can be activated by loading specific licenses or by rewriting the EEPROM directly (requires desoldering).

I was told the list of options was recreated from the MS2720T_V4.60 FW but should be the same of other models FW.

Beware that the whole EEPROM contents has the bytes bit-reversed. The fields are Low-Endian as usual.

To (re-)calculate the EEPROM Checksum, you just need to sum all bytes inside the red areas (see picture). The result should be placed in the green area.

[anmony]

On my MT8222A I was able to telnet into the VxWorks shell, and they left a handy command to update the options and EEPROM checksum for you. Checking a few of the option numbers against your list, it looks like roughly the same option list was in my firmware (v1.80). The VxWorks command is "sysSetOpts" and just takes a byte array as input that gets written to EEPROM. There is also a "readEEPROM" command that you could use to backup the contents of your EEPROM before messing with it, for example I had run "readEEPROM 0x240, 0x10" to look at my options data before and after modifications (looks like you have identified that offset as "OldOpts (*** OPTIONS ***)").

The attached script is what I used to generate the sysSetOpts command to enable all of the (sensible) options on my device. VxWorks shell did not require any login, just telnet on default port (23). The sysSetOpts command just calls statUnprotectEeprom/gstatRWEEPROM/statProtectEeprom so you may be able to do the same things if sysSetOpts isn't directly available in your firmware.

I was able to extend the frequency range of the VNA in my device from 4GHz to 6GHz with this, and although the performance is somewhat degraded beyond 4GHz (maybe missing some factory calibration or something? or could just be hardware limitations), it does work fine after calibration with reduced dynamic range. I tend to just use my LiteVNA now instead though because it's so much faster and easier to use, and the MT82222A occasionally stops working (UI still responds but acquisition does not, not sure if hardware or software issue). It's still a useful spectrum analyzer though apart from being a bit slow.

[tv84]

Some other commands:

sysSetMACAddr
sysSetExtSN
sysSetIntSN
sysSetModel

sysSetOpts - updates Options of the first 2 UInt64 bitmask (1_to_128)
sysSetNewOpts - updates Options of the second 2 UInt64 bitmask (129_to_256)