Spurious measurements on Agilent PXA N9030A Using LabVIEW

[hnguyen1023]

I am looking into Automating my Spurious Measurement, and I am looking at possibly buying LabVIEW.  The equipment is Agilent PXA.  Would someone familiar with LabVIEW tell me if the LabVIEW base version is good enough for this project?  I am a newbie here, as well as in programing in general and LabVIEW in particular.  Thanks in advance!

Hung

[hnguyen1023]

Hmm... 38 views but it looks like none are familiar with automatic spurs test.  Ok, I downloaded the evaluation LabVIEW and have been reading, watching through tutorial, notes, etc..  I downloaded the driver for the PXA which provides a bunch of VIs like "Initialize", "configure measurements", "close".... So far so good.  I wired up a simple program to control the PXA but obviously it didn't work.  I looks like the PC/Labview doesn't detect the instrument, which is connected through LAN.  My PC doesn't have a GPIB card yet.  This will come later.  For now how do I make this work through IP address?    I attached a screenshot of my block diagram here.    Could someone please help me out!

P.S: When I go to tools/Instrument/Find Instrument driver/ and then scan for instrument nothing come up.

[hnguyen1023]

Hmm... 38 views but it looks like none are familiar with automatic spurs test.  Ok, I downloaded the evaluation LabVIEW and have been reading, watching through tutorial, notes, etc..  I downloaded the driver for the PXA which provides a bunch of VIs like "Initialize", "configure measurements", "close".... So far so good.  I wired up a simple program to control the PXA but obviously it didn't work.  I looks like the PC/Labview doesn't detect the instrument, which is connected through LAN.  My PC doesn't have a GPIB card yet.  This will come later.  For now how do I make this work through IP address?    I attached a screenshot of my block diagram here.    Could someone please help me out!

P.S: When I go to tools/Instrument/Find Instrument driver/ and then scan for instrument nothing come up.

[will.i.am10]

Hello,

You will also need to download NI VISA from NI's drivers page (below). Also, have you tried any of the examples that come with the driver download?

NI VISA: http://www.ni.com/downloads/drivers/

-will.i.am10

[hnguyen1023]

Thank you for you answer!  I forgot about NI-VISA.  That was actually the reason there was no communication with the equipment.  Now that has been corrected, my simple program is able to change some settings of the analyzer.  However, when it gets to the "read measurements" block, I always get the error "Invalid character;The character '0' is invalid."  I figure this is the n value of "Read Option" input.  I read the manual of the PXA and figured n should be 1 for the SCPI command  :READ:SPUR[n]  to work probably.  So I changed this from 0 to 1.  Now I get the error "Invalid character;The character '1' is invalid"

Could anybody help?

[will.i.am10]

Have you tried the examples that come with the driver? It is possible that there are other commands this device is looking for, or other setup that needs to be done.

-will.i.am10

[hnguyen1023]

Hi again will.i.am10,

So I have got so far as to make the analyzer run the test and return data.  Every loop it spits out a 2 dimension array of data.  I am trying to combine these 2D arrays into one final array at the end of the iterations.  I have tried "insert into array" or "replace subset" but all of these take only 1D elements.  Could you give me a pointer on this!  Thanks!

[will.i.am10]

Hello,

You should be able to use the "Build Array" subvi. This will accept 2D arrays and create a 3D array from that data. If you need to see data from previous loop iterations check out the section on "Stacked Shift Registers" in the link below.

Shift Registers: http://www.ni.com/getting-started/labview-basics/shift-registers#Stacked Shift Registers

-will.i.am10