Why my PCI NI 5401 has an error of the 10% on the amplitude?

[Falcomu]

Dear NI Technical service,

I have a waveforme generator card model PCI NI 5401. Measuring with the oscilloscope I verified that there is an error of the 10% on the amplitude of the generated signal, respect to the user setted voltage on each alternate waveforme generated. Otherwise, if i try to generate a DC signal the output is always 0V if the user setted voltage is less than 2.5 V, and between 6V and 11V if the user setted voltage is between 2.5V and 5V (that is the max possible setup).

Could you please help me?

Thanks a lot


Ennio

[RobSims]

Hi Ennio,

Thank you for your post.

A 10% error is pretty large for a PCI card. How long have you had the card? Have you tried a self-calibration of the device within Measurement & Automation Explorer? - this may help solve the apparent error on the card itself. If the self calibration fails you may wish to consider having the card professionally calibrated or, if the worst comes to be, it may need to be repaired.

Our cards are normally shipped with a calibration period of 12-24 months. Outside of this time it cannot be garaunteed to be behaving itself 100%. And as I said before, I wouldn't consider this to be normal behaviour for this device.

If you have any other queries regarding this issue just ask.
Let me know how you get on.
Many thanks,

Rob

[Falcomu]

---

@Ethereal wrote:
Hi Ennio,

Thank you for your post.

A 10% error is pretty large for a PCI card. How long have you had the card? Have you tried a self-calibration of the device within Measurement & Automation Explorer? - this may help solve the apparent error on the card itself. If the self calibration fails you may wish to consider having the card professionally calibrated or, if the worst comes to be, it may need to be repaired.

Our cards are normally shipped with a calibration period of 12-24 months. Outside of this time it cannot be garaunteed to be behaving itself 100%. And as I said before, I wouldn't consider this to be normal behaviour for this device.

If you have any other queries regarding this issue just ask.
Let me know how you get on.
Many thanks,

Rob

---

Hello Rob,

thanks for your reply.

I did a selfcalibration of my PCI card few times, but the error persist. Do yoy think I have to send my card in maintenance? The card is less than 1 year old.

Many thanks


Ennio

[RobSims]

Hi again Ennio,

It sounds like the card is behaving erroneously to say the least. If you could post a contact email address on this forum I'll contact you to try and progress this further.

Could you also try to source the serial number for your card for our information.

Many thanks,

Rob

Applications Engineer | National Instruments UK & Ireland

[Falcomu]

Hello Rob,

my email adress is:

e.capria.2003@cranfield.ac.uk

The NI PCI 5401 card serial number is:

D9CF79

Thanks a lot for helping me.


Kindest regards


Ennio

[Jamaloogy]

Hi there..

I have same hardware and same problem with Falcomu... but even worse.. error were up to 30% and in addition noise was highly noticeable
For now I'm not sure that this problem coming from card.. because when I try to put it to the unused PCI slot (quite long time), it perform up to spec for about
1 minutes and it start to attenuate again.

several condition to cosider..

* I just received my card 2 month ago from RMA
* Will try to put in on another PC, hope it will work well? This lead to a question, do Power Supply Unit in the PC greatly affect the perfomance on NI PCI 5401?
* Do you think SMB to BNC cable supplied also lead to this problem..

Thanks.. will post some update tomorrow..

[hannahW]

Hi there

If you think that there may be a problem with your board, contact your NI office to discuss this with technical support

If you go to the following link, you can find the contact details for your local branch

http://www.ni.com/niglobal/

Hannah
NIUK & Ireland

[NeilF]

Ensure that your load is 50 ohms.  If not, you'll have to adjust.  When you ask for 5V, NI-FGEN assumes you have a 50 ohm load.  If you have a high impedance load, you will get almost 10 Volts.  If you know your output impedance you can compensate. 

For newer signal generators (5421, 22, 12, 41), you can set the Load Impedance attribute to inform NI-FGEN of your load impedance and NI-FGEN will do the calculation for you.

Neil F.