Problem commanding Maury Tuner Controller using LabVIEW

[gary 236]

I am trying to control the Motors and thier Position on a Maury Tuner Controller "MT986A" with LabVIEW via the GPIB bus. This is an older style controller (1988) listed as IEE-488 compliant. The controller can presently be controlled using a DOS based program that is no longer supported. I am trying to upgrade the controllers automation to LabVIEW 6i. Any help would be appreciated. I have tried using visa,gpib,488.1 and 488.2 commands and have only succeded in being able to change control from one motor to another. I have not been able to change the position of any motor. My computer is a 733MHz celeron and a PCI-GPIB card.

[Aaron Marks]

What problem are you actually running into? Does the instrument respond to ibic comands in the Windows environment? Does it respond to basic queries like *IDN?. Are you getting any error messages returned by the error cluster in LV?

[Farhan75230]

were you able to control the Maury MT 986 Tuner in this way what specific command set did you use? Please let me know I am also facing the same problem. I have the command set for the Maury LXI series but not for the MT 986 tuners as they are very old.

[RavensFan]

Aaron last visited the forums in 2010.  I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for him to respond to your question.

[Farhan75230]

lol, i hope someone among them does, I have tried using Visa for controlling the tuner and the standard SCPI commands over the GPIB but its not working. I was wondering how the dude was able to communicate with and change the motors of the tuner.

[GerdW]

Hi,

wow, a 17 years old thread about a 41 year old device…

I was wondering how the dude was able to communicate with and change the motors of the tuner.

The usual answer is: read the (programming) manual.

That can be hard to get for such old devices…

(Sometimes it might be easier to replace such old hardware by new devices.)

[Farhan75230]

Thanks Guys but I have now figured out the problem and the tuner is moving correctly as well. It turns out that maury provides a Dynamic link library which can be called into labview and be used for programming as well as a library node. Initially I was unable to use it as my 64 bit labview couldn't call 32 bit library as windows doesn't support mixed modes but then I downloaded the 32-bit labview software and was able to call the library along with their provided sample program to use the tuner. Also there is no point in even trying to develop a driver for this piece of software as it only supports IEEE 488.1 and is completely indifferent to IEEE 488.2 commands and also all I know is that the library for the driver was written in C using Glib. The company provided and compiled 32-bit DLL library is the only hope of getting this machine to work! or simply buy LXI maury tuner series which supports the standard IEEE 488.2 commands!

[Pat_Lab]

Hello,

I have the same old Maury MT 986 i'd like to use with labview to make some load pull experiments. 

Could you share the dll  ?

Thanks,

Patrick

[quagliar]

Hi, I am in a very similar situation, any luck obtaining the dll?

Thanks a lot!

Rob