01:43 <monochroma> :D

01:45 <azonenberg> Excited to see how they perform

01:45 <azonenberg> they're actually impedance controlled unlike the old oshpark ones

01:45 <azonenberg> And are, i think, lower loss

01:46 <azonenberg> I say "i think" because i don't actually know what Df of the flexible soldermask was so i had to guess a bit :p

08:24 <azonenberg> oook this is conclusive

08:24 <azonenberg> I know what's wrong with the AKL-PD1

08:24 <azonenberg> I shorted the inP and inN terminals together, turned on the amplifier, and got something like -30 dBm of wifi out

08:25 <azonenberg> The ground plane under the diffpair is floating at the tip end (it would have to be, there's nothing to ground it to since the whole point of a diffprobe is not to have a common mode connection to the DUT other than for grounding reasons)

08:25 <azonenberg> The ground plane is also about 125mm long

08:25 <azonenberg> Which makes it an almost perfect full wave dipole for 2.4 GHz ISM band

08:26 <azonenberg> It may be a horrible probe but i think it's actually a halfway decent wifi antenna :D

08:26 <azonenberg> monochroma: ^

08:27 <azonenberg> basically my signal trace is a coplanar waveguide sandwiched between wifi antennas

08:31 <azonenberg> Now i need to do something about that

08:31 <azonenberg> I'm wondering about doing a single layer board with an edge coupled diffpair just floating on substrate, no ground anywhere nearby

08:32 <azonenberg> this should force a fully differential propagation mode

08:33 <azonenberg> it'll basically act like a twisted pair would, except not twisted

08:33 <azonenberg> The question then is what do i do with the ground at the SMPM connector? i guess i can just float it and see what happens

09:50 <monochroma> azonenberg: heh! i win!

17:47 <azonenberg> Yay probe updates! Ordered some slide-on ferrite corers as well as stick-on ferrite sheets to play with reducing common mode noise on the AKL-PD1 (may do this instead of, or in addition to, a respin without the ground plane)

17:47 <azonenberg> Also the AKL-PT2 prototypes scanned in hong kong, cleared chinese customs for export, and are eta Thursday

23:48 <azonenberg> So it looks like I might be getting another Tek MSO4/5/6 loaner scope soonish

23:48 <azonenberg> apparently some of the devs at tek have heard of my woes and there was a major refactoring of a lot of the SCPI code going on

23:49 <azonenberg> They're interested in feedback on the new beta firmware

23:49 <azonenberg> They're probably gonna send me a demo scope running the new code on a couple of weeks

23:50 <azonenberg> I look forward to seeing if they've improved it. The MSO6 looks like really nice hardware if only the scpi interface wasn't so buggy

23:52 <azonenberg> More importantly this should give me a direct line to Tek's firmware team to discuss ways to make the APIs for future instruments better

23:53 <azonenberg> I'm very curious if they'd be interested in trying out the dual socket model at some point (SCPI for control plane and then push-based data)