The HP 8753A provides excellent RF network measurements for the lab and production test areas. When combined with a test set, it yields a complete solution for characterizing the linear behavior of wither active or passive networks, devices or components from 300 kHz to 3 GHz. With two independent display channels available, you can simultaneously measure and and display the reflection and transmission characteristics of the device under test. The easy-to-use soft-key selection of measurement functions allows you to quickly measure the magnitude, the phase, or group delay characteristics of the device under test. Directly measure the electrical length of a single device or phase match multiple devices. Data can be displayed in a log magnitude, linear magnitude, SWR, phase, group delay, polar, real or Smith Chart formats. The two independent display channels can be viewed separately or simultaneously in overlay or split screen formats.

The HP 8753A's integrated synthesized source provides >100 mw of output power, 1 Hz frequency resolution, and linear or logarithmic frequency sweeps.

All of the functions of the HP 8753A are completely programmable from an external computer through the Hewlett-Packard Interface-Bus. Draw/label custom graphics into the CRT of the HP 8753A using Hewlett Packard Graphics Language commands. The entire CRT display - including the custom graphics can be copied to a compatible HP-GL plotter or printer.

The HP 8753A (with Option 010) has the capability of displaying the time domain response of a network obtained by computing the Inverse Fourier Transform of the frequency domain response. The time domain response displays the reflection coefficient versus time, yielding the magnitude and location of each individual discontinuity of the network. It can also display the transmission coefficient versus time, yielding simulated transient response analysis of the network.

The HP 8753A offers two time domain modes. The Low Pass mode provides the traditional Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR) measurement capability and gives the response of the network to ma (mathematically-simulated) step or impulse response. This mode gives information of the type of impedance (R, L, C) present at the discontinuity. The Band Pass time domain mode, which has only the impulse stimulus, may be used over any frequency range to give the time domain response of frequency selective devices such as SAW filters or antennas.

Gating is another powerful time domain feature that may be used to selectively isolate a single response in time and them convert just that response back to the frequency domain. For the reflection measurements, this provides the capability to view the return loss of individual portions of a high frequency component without disturbing the actual circuit. For transmission measurements, one can view the frequency and time domain responses of individual transmission paths.