jjoonathan

Oh, you're in RAMP mode! Yeah, that drifts too much to hold a load calibration. This is expected behavior, it's designed to trade away precision to get speed. This will be worst on the 8350, which is completely unsynthesized, and on the upper end of each band on the 8340, which is also unsynthesized. You should see much better stability at the low end of each ramp band on the 8340 (which is synthesized) and you should be able to get that good stability everywhere if you use the 8340 source and put it in STEP mode to synthesize every point.

If you can get your hands on an 8360 source, it will synthesize both the start and end of RAMP sweeps (starting on the second sweep -- it looks to see how far off it was and corrects it), and you will also have significantly faster STEP sweeps.

They've treated me fine -- the broken one I bought that way. YTOs have given me trouble, though.

EDIT: obligatory, pictures https://photos.app.goo.gl/KwvnMGm5GyvnmgE58

Yes, I'd expect better (though maybe not necessarily 50dB+). Troubleshooting:

1. First suspect is always a bad calibration -- they tend to be unstable in addition to incorrect, but if you have anything with known(-ish) S parameters you can check for correctness too.

2. Second step is to put it in TDR mode and watch to see where the TDR changes. That's where your problem is.

3. A trip through the test set with a torque wrench is a good way to not just check the connections but also calibrate your intuition about the couplers/mixers, which should help interpret #2. You can loosen connectors in sequence and watch them spike on TDR to zero in on the actual problem.

As it happens, I was comparing my 8510C + 8517B to a FieldFox recently and I took some drift measurements, although those were on a short rather than a load. The 8510C blew the FieldFox out of the water, lol. Given the TDR, this might be because the standard itself was temperature sensitive and the FieldFox ports are piping hot, but still.

https://jjoonathan.github.io/plot_drift.html

In case they are useful, here are a bunch of different standards measured by the two instruments.

https://github.com/jjoonathan/cal-std-8510-fieldfox/blob/mai...

EDIT: Also worth mentioning, I recently upstreamed my nice 8510C driver into scikit-rf!

https://scikit-rf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/vi/generated/...

Oh wow, I was just transplanting some TC702 amplifiers to save the doubler in an old 50GHz HP signal generator... would that have been designed by these guys back when they were part of HP?

https://www.keysight.com/us/en/assets/7018-04165/application...

EDIT: that's registration-walled, but this HP Journal article isn't. https://archive.org/details/Hewlett-Packard_Journal_Vol._42_... The amplifiers in question are blue-colored in the background, and the doubler that uses them is the spiritual successor to the rear-most golden module.

EDIT2: yep, the timeline lines up. The HP journals with these amplifiers were early 90s, and "This division became part of Agilent Technologies when HP spun off its test and measurement business in 1999. Later, in 2005, Agilent spun off its semiconductor products group, which became Avago Technologies. "

It really is suitable for most transmission line applications, though, because transmission line impedance is a fixed target. Top-shelf 20-30GHz probes use this exact technique as their "front end" followed by a 50/100 ohm amplifier to lock in the noise figure:

https://www.tek.com/en/datasheet/trimode%28tm%29-probe-famil...

10 minutes during weekday business hours plus 30 for commute and 20 minutes of standing in line if you go at noon. Also, the discoverability of this workflow is complete dogshit.

None of this is a problem for me, but I fully understand why dishonest businessfolk love to exploit the hell out of these "tiny conditions" and then turn around and pretend they don't understand why they are a big deal.

Yes, but you want alignment even if you don't want censorship. A very intelligent but unaligned model will be prone to doing useless things like "auto-complete" your question into a more elaborate version or responding with "just google it dumbass" and other forms of internet vitriol.

It's basic macro. Assets, exports, capital accounts, current accounts, savings, investment. Essentially, windfall surplus in one area causes savings bubbles causes investment bubbles causes asset pumps and export dumps, usually in a different area. He cites a bunch of historical examples and then goes step by step through techniques for identifying sources/sinks and directionality.

Oh, and did you know that Ricardo based his analysis on the assumption of a closed capital account? It's interesting how the theory of comparative advantage usually gets invoked without mentioning that ;)

If you dogmatically reject the idea that political economy could possibly involve the concept of class, I'd love to hear how your analysis clusters the interests involved. In any case, he's not a CCP shill. He throws some mean punches in that direction with facts and figures to back them up. Everyone hustles in the world economy.

Book recommendation: "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Michael Pettis.

If you don't buy the apologetics that permeate the popular economics sphere but still want an expert to walk you through the details, this is your book.

Maybe the program is dominated by a few people who got really, uhh, efficient at cranking out patents and the new prices reflect the hourly rate of keeping the hustle going rather than attracting new prospective inventors with fresh ideas.

Housing costs have been growing at 2x wages for 50 years. If space was a constraint then, imagine how it is now.

How many times did boomers look at the two buttons before them, "make housing affordable" and "make housing a good investment," and which button did they press every singe time?

Compressed gas at 200atm is a different kind of explosive.

Good job passing the dice roll to stay out of the special hell where the SMS code never arrives.

The dems wouldn't have dug in their heels to oppose a can-kicking fix.

This just assumes someone else fixes the storage/overprovision problem, otherwise energy will get cheaper in the summer and more expensive in the winter until storing euros does not work.

Are other brand EVs selling at high prices? Or are they sitting on lots at high prices?

Sure, but I think it's fair to say that feedback has gotten too minimal when you have to put sleep(10) all over your diagnostic processes because there is no other way to tell if the computer/app is laggy or dead.

Peace was never an option!

One time an ADC chip in my Rigol scope died. From the pinout, it was clearly a Chinese clone of a TI part. I wanted a replacement clone part, but it wasn't available under the clone name, so I bought the cheapest most suspicious listing of the TI part that I could find, hoping I would get the clone. Unfortunately I got the genuine article. So it goes. https://goo.gl/photos/dxU3ChWUcvCMDW4N9

Fortunately I was able to make do with the genuine part, though not trivially: there was a weird clock termination difference. It's never easy, is it?

> you can simply disable them selectively

Last time an ad-blocker caused a multi-hour debugging debacle, that turned out to not be the case. It was preventing me from logging into my bank even when it was supposedly disabled.

I use a 1Mii B03 connected to my PC through TOSLINK. It has a physical switch to toggle between low latency and high definition mode.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll give freetube a spin!

I lived it. Someone saying they "debunked" it doesn't change my experience.

Hmm. Maybe I should try uBlock. I usually don't like adblockers -- both on principle, because I believe in paying for what I consume, and because they tend to subtly break a website and cause hours of headaches at least once a year -- but I don't like feeding the beast either. I'll look into this.

Google finally beat my hands with a stick firmly enough to get me off Firefox.

It was youtube. Not the ads -- I pay for premium -- but the fact that on FF they added an artificial 5s page load delay on firefox plus a bug has lingered for months where it always loads the last video, so you have to load every video twice. 12s/video is too much delay.

Ah well, it was good while it lasted.

Nixon didn't know that the evidence tying him to the Chennault Affair was weak. If it was weak, he could play the "I didn't know" card. If it was strong, he would have had to play the much worse "It wasn't illegal" card. These are mutually exclusive, so conducting a criminal operation to get a peak at the evidence was a rational gamble. It didn't pay off, but no, just chilling was not a good option and no, the underlying act was not the lesser evil.

Yes, TOSLINK is a godsend. It's immune to ground loops and motherboard manufacturers that don't give a shit, which is all of them, even ones that brand around having decent audio (ProArt I'm looking at you).

External bluetooth transmitters/receivers are also the cure for shitty PC bluetooth stacks.

They don't switch to garbage quality mode every time an app, website, or game queries the microphone. They don't re-enable shitty defaults every software update. They don't require text config files in linux and the critical settings in those files don't get ignored due to open source politics. They don't mess up pairing every time you reboot into a different OS. They just work. $50 will banish all your bluetooth troubles to the deepest pits of the underworld, where they belong.

I suspect it has to do with the degree to which your past was plagued with cheap soap operas vs poorly performing video games.

To be fair it's an amazing last name and it feels like there probably is a story, it just has to do with this guy's ancestors rather than the assembler tool we all know and love.