Agilent Technologies E4406A VSA manual Operation and Questionable Status Registers

Programming Fundamentals

Using the Instrument Status Registers

In addition to the standard event status register, the standard event status group also contains a standard event status enable register. This register lets you choose which bits in the standard event status register will set the summary bit (bit 5 of the status byte register) to 1. Send the *ESE <number> command where <number> is the sum of the decimal values of the bits you want to enable. For example, to enable bit 7 and bit 6 so that whenever either of those bits is set to 1, the standard event status summary bit of the status byte register will be set to 1, send the command *ESE 192 (128 + 64). The command *ESE? returns the decimal value of the sum of the bits previously enabled with the *ESE <number> command.

The standard event status enable register presets to zeros (0).

Operation and Questionable Status Registers

The operation and questionable status registers are registers that monitor the overall instrument condition. They are accessed with the STATus:OPERation and STATus:QUEStionable commands in the STATus command subsystem.

Operation Status Register The operation status register monitors the current instrument measurement state. It checks to see if the instrument is calibrating, sweeping, or waiting for a trigger. For more information see the *OPC? command located in the Common IEEEE Commands section of the Language Reference chapter.

Questionable Status Register The questionable status register monitors the instrument to see if anything questionable has happened. It is looking for anything that might cause an error or a bad measurement like a hardware problem, an out of calibration situation, or a unusual signal. All the bits are summary bits from lower-level event registers.

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