[Radio Wrangler]

I bought a new, unopened RA117 from a surplus dealer in Yorkshire and drove it north to Scotland on the back seat of the Cooper S I'd 'restored' == built up from a new shell.

8970b....

Ah, I got asked to look into production difficulties with those in the mid 90's and I found the IF gain steps were not perfectly additive due to some leakage in the 20MHz IF. A fix was easy and all of a sudden units on the line started being in the middle of their accuracy tolerances. While doing this, I noticed it used an MC6809 chipset... ooo -err rather obsolete, and life-bought. Stocks were dwindling, and the 8970 was going to be needed by customers long-term.

I used to have all the design notes from the original 8970 team sitting on my desk. Fascinating readiing. I think they're landfill somewhere outside Edinburgh now.

So I cooked up an idea for a replacement noise figure box. Built a breadboard that covered a couple of benches and did some marketing figures. Management bought the idea and we staffed up a project which turned into the 8970 replacement. As the company split, it went out as the Agilent Noise Figure Analyser family. The receiver was partially DSP and did true RMS noise level measurement (better than diodes if the noise PDF is uncertain) built in graphics and coverage to 26GHz. I did the matching smart noise sources as a 1-man project. I understand sales have been over a quarter of a billion bucks. My share was nothing beyond the salary.

David