[Premium-Rx] OT: HP3586B questions!

[Jeff Anderson]

In my opinion, the 3586B is a very useful piece of equipment that I often use when testing SSB transmitters - it makes a great monitor for audio quality.  I've got one on the bench and three "spares" in the closet.

The first thing one should do when purchasing one of these units is to remove the top cover, remove the board with the NICAD battery, and REMOVE THE BATTERY.  The three spare units I have I bought incredibly inexpensively because were all literally "smoked."  Their batteries had leaked and destroyed either part of the board they were mounted on or, even worse, the mother board below.  A real pain to repair.

Apart from this obvious design flaw, though, the 3586B is an impressive bit of engineering and quite a versatile piece of test equipment.

And a friend of mine has modified one (by adding an AGC circuit) to make a tolerable shortwave receiver that he tunes via GPIB.

- Jeff, WA6AHL
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: J. Forster 
  To: GandalfG8 at aol.com 
  Cc: premium-rx at ml.skirrow.org ; ToddRoberts2001 at aol.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 2:50 PM
  Subject: Re: [Premium-Rx] OT: HP3586B questions!


  My experience with an HP 3586C is that it is a poor receiver because the demods are just not right. OTOH, there is a mode where you can count the carrier of the signal you are tuned to, which is really neat. It does work well for measuring signal strengths also (not much of a surprise) which is useful for antenna testing and modeling. 
  -John 

  GandalfG8 at aol.com wrote: 

    Hi Todd 
    AGC is a real problem with these, no doubt about that, but the VLF coverage can be a real bonus too. 

    Some variants of the 3586 aren't even ideal for SSB, so that's something to watch out for, and none come with bandwidths that suit AM....

    


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