If your Spectrum software worked successfully with an older National Instruments GPIB card (and the NI-488.2 GPIB hardware driver), then you should be able to buy the latest GPIB card and use the latest driver. Generally, if you can the third party software to work with any of the GPIB hardware, it will work with all of our hardware. However, I am not familiar with the Spectrum software and cannot make any guarantees.
The most common card is probably the PCI-GPIB card. Most new PCs use the PCI architecture instead of the older ISA bus architecture, so the PCI-GPIB card can be used in almost all new PCs. Depending on your application, you could also use an GPIB-ENET (ethernet GPIB) or USB-GPIB instead. It really depends on what you are doing.
To confirm your
choice of a new GPIB card, I would recommend talking to the company that created the Spectrum software to see if they have any advice. They will be more familiar with which NI hardware will work best with their software, and should be able to advise of any known issues that you can steer clear of.
Regards,
Mike N.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
