Agilent 5242 LAN VISA resource in MAX

[trickymint]

Problem: unable to establish a VISA resource in NI-MAX to an Agilent N5242 Precision Network Analyser over LAN.

Using:

NI-MAX 4.3

NI-VISA 4.2

Note: can ping IP address of N5242 instrument and can send and recieve SCPI data via Telnet at instrument IP address 192.168.0.202. Can obtain VISA resource in MAX via GPIB address 16 but nothing via LAN. Other Agilent instruments connected via LAN in the system return VISA resources in MAX OK.

Any ideas? I have had comms problems with a VXI instrument in the past which necessitaed a different version of NI-VISA. Is this likely to be the source of the problem here?

Thanks

[BeejalS]

Hi

Did you follow the instructions here to configure your instrument? If so, where did you get an error? Or which part did not work as expected?

Regards

[trickymint]

Hi Beejal,

I followed the knowledgebase instructions for adding a LAN instrument as suggested but this resulted in the same error when performing a "validate" from the TCP/IP settings tab in MAX on the 5242 resource.

Note: in my system I have a total of 6 VISA TCP/IP Resources as shown in MAX explorer. Five of the resources are identified with no problem only the 5242 PNA has a black on yellow exclamation mark. It is when I perform a validate on this resource I get the error message pop-up:

Could not open a VISA session to "TCPIP0::192.168.0.202::inst0::INSTR"

VISA error code 0xBFFF0012

Invalid resource reference specified. Parsing error.

Hope that gives you more to work on.

Thanks.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Have you confirmed with Agilent that the LAN interface is actually VXI-11 compliant? I took a quick look at the instrument manual and I'm not convinced that it is?

[trickymint]

Hi,

After re-visiting the Agilent 5242 instrument help I came across this gem of information: the LAN is configured as a remote GPIB interface, i.e. the PNA LAN is presented as a virtual GPIB interface. The penny finally dropped when I went back to MAX and went through the process of creating a new VISA TCP/IP resource and selecting manual entry of LAN instrument. On the "next" step the hint jumped out at me in the form of: "the LAN device name is often "inst0" or "gpib0,1" ". The bottom line was due to using "inst0" as the LAN device name but because the PNA LAN is a virtual GPIB interface I should have been using "gpib0,16", the address of the real GPIB interface on the PNA.

Now all is well, thanks for the sublimimal help.