HP82169A usefull in anno 2022?

[Christoph Giesselink]

HP-IB or IEEE 488 is not fully obsolete now.

IMHO in professional test systems measurement instruments with Legacy RS232C or USB interface are not professional, these are hobby interfaces for very small measurement systems.

Remaining today we have instruments with IEEE 488 or a LAN interface using TCP/IP. But still some reference measurement have only an IEEE 488 interface. Mostly all instruments published in the last 15 years have a Ethernet interface now.

What I'm talking about?

In the 90'ies a typical measurement system I used consists of

• Power Supply
• Multimeter
• DC Calibrator
• Resistor Decade
• Resistor Decade
• Frequency generator
  

all with a IEEE 488 interface.

On other systems we also used additional pressure references for different ranges all with a IEEE 488 interface too. So a measurement system with 5 or more instruments was normal. On larger systems, especially with long distances between instruments, we had problems with signal reflections because the IEEE 488 interface don't use a signal terminator. Of course in this systems we tried to avoid a star topology to reduce the open endpoints.

In the beginning we used IEEE 488 ISA cards from Ines with DOS-drivers. Around 2000 with Win NT4.0 as OS, older cards had to be modified by the manufacturer and the new software consists of a Windows specific driver and HP-VISA drivers.

Early/Mid of the '00 years PC boards with an ISA slot get rare and so we bought Ines interface cards with a PCI interface still using the combination of Windows specific driver and HP-VISA drivers.

But HP-VISA as interface was not the best choice. Many software using the VISA interface were develop for the interface of the market leader NI! So we had to rewrite every software, especially software written by the manufacturer showing the capabilities of the instrument.

End of the '00 years also PC's with PCI bus get rare, so we decided not to use PC cards any more. We don't wanted to buy new IEEE 488 cards for every new PC generation with a new bus interface. So further we used an external LAN to IEEE 488 converter from NI with NI-VISA.

Sorry, I don't miss the HP-VISA drivers any more. With Windows 10 an update to the latest version of NI-VISA was necessary, so for the first time since using NI-VISA we had to recompile our sources. The software build with prior versions of the VISA-DLL interface crashed.

From the driver aspect, the NI-VISA drivers are a better choice, especially when you want to control instruments with LAN Interface over VISA. The VISA standard for TCP/IP instruments had some dialects and in many cases I was not able to connect instruments over TCP/IP with the HP-VISA driver.

But meanwhile I'm glad that I have also calibration systems without any IEEE 488 connected instrument, all using Ethernet connections over TCP/IP mainly raw sockets, others over TCP/IP in NI-VISA.

Will I ever connect an IEEE 488 instrument to a HP-IL controller like the HP-71B to control something. No, I don't.

HP82169A useful in anno 2022?

So not for me, the HP82169A is only interesting for me as collectors item without the IEEE 488 cable and an IEEE 488 capable instrument.