HP/Agilent 6060A System DC Electronic Load: a quick repair

This is a 300 Watts, 60 Volts, 60 Amp electronic load, a quite handy device to have, especially, a HP/Agilent brand item. There are many cheap electronic loads, but I would rather recommend to get a good instrument, if you want to put some power supplies to real tests. Otherwise, you load may fail earlier than the supply.

The instrument we are dealing with here, a low cost auction fid – it had a bad front connector. These instrument use HP 60 Amp binding posts, these are quite rare and expensive (about EUR 40 per piece from Keysight), and the plastic gets brittle over time, and with overtightening it can break. The instrument had front and rear connections, I only need one set – so it will be an easy repair by just moving the good binding posts to the front.

Also, we find that all the X and Y rated capacitors have hair cracks, and are of RIFA brand, so these may fail soon – let’s replace them all.

The power is dissipated in several MOSFETs, all mounted to a large heatsink. Essentially, a small 300 Watts room heater, which is great to have these days in cold Japan.

The front connectors, after repair (just moved the rear connectors to the front, rear connectors, I don’t need them).

New caps soldered in – quite a difficult task because some vias are part of large copper fills, without thermal relieve, and I don’t want to preheat the whole board.

Finally managed to solder-in the X and Y capacitors.

A test at 40 Volts, 6 Amps, running for several hours with no issues at all!

Agilent 4352B VCO/PLL Signal Analyzer: working!

After a short xmas vacation, several spare parts arrived, including, 10 amp solder-in fuses, and thermal glue (704 silicon glue).

The glue is needed to mount the defective/blown thermal fuse to the power resistor. This resistor usually stays cool but will heat up in case of a power supply failure.

The fuse protects the primary of the switchmode transformer, it is a 10 Amp fuse, and it took a while to find it – it is located in a hidden place underneath the transformer.

Now, with the fuse installed, the thermal fuse glued to the resistor, and the two drive mostfets replaced, the Artsyn 24 Volts supply is starting up just fine. All self-tests passed!

Next step, let’s update the firmware, and do some tests.

The firmware version 2.11 is the latest one available, but it needs to be loaded from a 3.5 inch floppy – I have a USB floppy drive here, and one single disc which I purchased from Sri Lanka. Took a few attempts to convince the 4352B to read the disc and load the firmware. But finally, success!

Many tests could be done, here just a simple test with a 15 MHz signal from a 3585A vs. a 8642B generator. Seems to work well, and easy to use.

Now we can close the case, and use the device for VCO characterization, phase noise measurement, etc.