I just had claude walk me through refurbishing a Rohde & Schwarz signal generator from the 90s. It feels pretty cool getting a multi thousand dollar piece of equipment for 60 bucks even if you have no idea what you'll use it for.

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tverbeure 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Was that by any chance the R&S AMIQ that I refurbished in an earlier blog post?

And yes, it's a lot of fun bringing these bargain bin pieces of kit back to life.

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jlawrence6809 12 hours ago | parent [-]

My model is an SMIQ03E actually! I've grown quite addicted to going to my local 2nd hand electronics store in recent months scrounging for anything with an rs232 port!

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tverbeure 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I looked for a SMIQ for quite a while to go along with the AMIQ, but eventually settled for the R&S SFQ TV test transmitter that you can see here: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/06/28/Rohde-Schwarz-AMIQ-....

It can be used a vector RF signal generator with I/Q inputs. The only limitation is the reduced input bandwidth.

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jlawrence6809 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Very cool! Yeah I lucked out finding mine. It was in the intake section at my 2nd hand electronics store. It had a broken power button so they were selling it "as-is". A button repair and battery swap later I have a 3.3Ghz VNA. Can't complain!

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beala 6 hours ago | parent [-]

That's a great find, but afaict that model doesn't have VNA capabilities, does it? However, if you also stumble on a spectrum analyzer at that second hand store, you could combine them into a scalar network analyzer.

	▲	jlawrence6809 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oops yeah you're right, it's a VNG. A VNA would be great to have though! I wonder if these agents are going to just increase the utility of ever piece of equipment people can hook them to.