Fetch Measurement vs Reading Memory in Agilent 34461A Reading Speed

[Gamatatsu]

Hi there, 

Recently, I have succesfully connected to an 34461A Agilent and Labview, and I am trying the Acquire Triggered Multiple VI that allows me to configure the trigger and then to send a software trigger to the instrument. When the trigger is complete the Fetch Multiple Points VI is called and measurements are completed. However, I found this method very slow, In the manual I can see 50 readings per second when measuring AC voltage, however, this is really slow for a DMM. A small and cheap microcontroller will have much faster readings per second. Am I misunderstanding something? Is 50 readings per second the time for the instrument to comunicate to the PC? If so, do you have any idea how to measure the data and storage in the internal memory? That would be really fast and will allow to access the memory and read the data in a later step. 

Many thanks in advance

Cheers

[Albert.Geven]

Hi

The dmm is measuring in another way than the simple fast adc. Speed and accuracy are traded against each other.

But there are also fast dmm's. Just a bit more expensive. 50 times per second is indeed not fast.

Are you communicating via gpib,serial or tcp/ip? But normally the integration time of the dmm slows down more than communication.

[Gamatatsu]

Hi there,

Thanks for your prompt response. I have tried to configured the trigger and then send a trigger bus directly to the memory without plotting any data and it is still show a resolution of around 20ms per measurement. I straggle to connect the 34461A to the PC through UBS and I am using LAN cable that it works just fine. From my understanding, It should matter so much if the data is transmitted to the PC through different ways, the key point is how fast is able the dmm to record the data in the memory. 

Cheers