Anritsu MG3633A Signal Generator
A Teardown and Repair Log
A real boat anchor
Image by Ero-Shan
(click on image for larger view)
No kidding, this unit weighs a whopping 29kg. Imagine picking up five of them from a favourite used equipment dealer, all labelled defective in various interesting ways
Two of them made their way to fellow forum inhabitants, three left for me (not quite as expected), so I'm now the proud owner of these gems of Japanese RF engineering.
Don't turn them on, take'em apart
They came with mains voltage set to 120V. So the first thing to do was to fix that, a rather simple job.
First impression: Quite solid stuff and nicely engineered anyway
The desperately awaited first view under the hood, showing the main control board with plastic fiber optics. These guys really must have done everything to keep the digital noise
away from the RF part. On the bottom side, part of the power supply and the modulation board - but where's all the RF stuff?
Looks it is well hidden inside these inner containers - at least we've got to see some proper RF plumbing stuff now.
And now for something completely different
Don't be a coward, turn it on.
Yes, there's a sign of life ... (from the second unit, the first one didn't work)
Teardown
Goto here for some proper teardown pictures.
Repair #1
First one's got a wacky attenuator and missing reference frequency
Repair #2
Second one's got a freaky PLL
Repair #3
Third one's a complete fail, but comes to life again
Some components datasheets
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