EMC UI BB60C vs RSA306

Hi,

after using the RSA306 for EMC precompliance testing for quite a while ,now I also have a BB60C available.
So I thought I report my experience to you. Its only about the UI, as I did not have a chance to compare measurements yet.

1) The BB60C has a very big advantage, the QP detector. It works nicely. Just one thing I am missing: it would be nice to have a “Auto” checkbox for the RBW. It can be overlooked so easily to adjust it when walking from peak to peak.
2) Peak Table: the RSA sorts by default by margin. So the peak that violates most is first in the list. This is something I am missing badly. Seems very easy to add a column “margin” to the list. That would do it.
3) The Meter list is very handy, it just would be nice to be able to delete a line.
4) Range Table: here lies a problem for me. As I do not have a chamber available, I have to live with ambient noise that sometimes violates the limits. To avoid that this noise always adds to the Peak Table, I set many ranges and for some I disabled the limit. This is possible with the BB60C, too. I just set the limit very high. BUT, 10 ranges are not enough. 20 would be.
5) Dwell Time: finally, I did never manage to set a dwell time on the RSA306, but for the BB60C this is easy. Great! But why is there a limit for the dwell time that seems to get smaller with increasing width of a range? Where does it come from? Can it be bigger?
6) Presets: working with 3 different antennas for different frequency ranges, the RSA offers the ability to save and load complete setups. That is similiar to the Presets in the BB60C. But it seems, the presets do not set all parameters. Its a big problem in that case, that neiter the path loss tables nor the Ranges for EMC are saved/restored. So quickly changing from one antenna to the other is difficult. Also it is not so good that the “Load” in path loss tables does not remember the last folder..
7) Surely it would be nice to be able to have these presets as files because it is not easy to set them up.
8) It is really great that the BB60C supports independent values for the display reference and the input! Well done.
9) Then there is something both devices cannot do: a second trace in the EMI view. That would come in very handy to compare against the ambient noise….

I really love your products, used the SA44 long before Spike existed. You really made big steps forward. I hope my feedback will help to improve further.

Simon

Hi Simon,

Wow, this is excellent feedback. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this up. I think you propose a number of reasonable modifications. I will be making notes of all of your suggestions and determining where we can fit these into our development.

You did ask about the sweep time. There is an upper limit currently on the sweep time of 1 second overall. This limitation exists due to our architecture and how we process sweeps. This is unlikely to change at this point, without some substantial rework.

Regards,
Andrew

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