Spectrum Analysis in 1986

I have heard that when you use a tool your brain treats it like an extension of the body and, effectively, it becomes part of you. I don’t know if this applies to electronic test equipment, but certainly some of my strongest memories of learning practical electronics are the equipment I used in different periods.

In 1986 I joined the Communications Lab at GEC Research as a student apprentice, or “intern” as people would probably say now. It turned out to be a fateful decision because I worked on early trials for the GSM cellular system and that defined the future direction of my career. The labs were proper research spaces with long wooden benches and lots of hand-made hardware which was cutting edge for the date. They also had a lot of fancy test equipment.

We had a raft of impressive Tek mainframe scopes on trolleys, but sometimes more exotic equipment was needed. Doing radio work a spectrum analyzer comes in handy and the most common one around the site was the Marconi Instruments 2382. Marconi was part of GEC so it made sense to buy in the family, but I think Marconi had genuinely produced a product that had a price/performance ratio that lead the industry. Using a computer-driven display (controlled by the good old 8085 CPU) to replace the storage-tube traditionally used for spectrum analyzers reduced costs and provided exciting features like GP-IB based plotter output.

Marconi2382 Spectrum Analyzer

The 2382 was a massive instrument of two brown boxes for the analyzer and the display. The combination was a foot tall (30cm) and nearly 2 feet deep. It was build like a tank. I am pretty sure that if it fell on you it would probably kill you. The controls included a vast field of clicky switches with embedded LEDs (no membrane keyboards for this monster). In fact my recollection of operating the device involves a lot of clicking. It had some kind of internal relay-driven attenuator and some operations would unleash vast sequences of clicks from the interior.

I think the 2382 was regarded as pretty cheap for what it did. This piece from IEEE Electronics and Power in May 1985 says the prices start at £18,500. £18,500 in 1985! Probably enough for a small house.

Learning to drive the 2382 was not just about learning to navigate its many controls. It also taught me a lot about how radio works in practice. Just looking at FM stations gave you a real visual model of ideas like noise, sidebands and carriers.

Despite it’s bulk and cost the 2382 had one major problem – a maximum operating frequency of 400MHz. Not enough for us to use it on the GSM baseband operating at 900MHz and pretty limiting for a lot of comms use. In the comms lab we often had to use even more expensive and exotic HP Analyzers. HP was pioneering the use of screen-menu driven interfaces so though their stuff was the bees knees it never matched the 2382 in terms of button-load shock and awe.

 For those that want to dig deeper, try the Marconi 2382 Data Sheet, or the service manual for the RF unit.