Agilent Technologies E4406A VSA Using the Instrument Status Registers, Using the Status Registers

Programming Fundamentals

Using the Instrument Status Registers

Using the Instrument Status Registers

When you are programming the instrument you may need to monitor instrument status to check for error conditions or monitor changes.You can determine the state of certain instrument events/conditions by programming the status register system. IEEE common commands (those beginning with *) access the higher-level summary registers. To access the information from specific registers you would use the STATus commands.

Using the Status Registers

Figure on page 82 shows the available instrument status registers and their hierarchy.

•“What are the Status Registers?” on page 76.

•“Why Would You Use the Status Registers?” on page 78.

•“Using a Status Register” on page 80.

•“Using the Service Request (SRQ) Method” on page 80.

•“What are the Status Registers?” on page 76.

•“Standard Event Status Register” on page 86.

•“Operation and Questionable Status Registers” on page 88.

What are the Status Registers?

The status system is comprised of multiple registers which are arranged in a hierarchical order. The lower-level status registers propagate their data to the higher-level registers in the data structures by means of summary bits. The status byte register is at the top of the hierarchy and contains general status information for the instrument’s events and conditions. All other individual registers are used to determine the specific events or conditions.

The operation and questionable status registers are sets of registers that monitor the overall instrument condition. They are accesed with the STATus:OPERation and STATus:QUEStionable commands in the STATus command subsystem. Each register set is made up of five registers:

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