Well, I guess last month’s ware was an easy one! The winner is tmbinc, email me to claim your prize :) I thought it was a neat ware–I actually have never seen the inside of a spectrum analyzer myself, and I thought it was very instructional to see how they modularized the design and piped the RF around using SMB cables.
Here is John Miles’ description of this ware:
It’s the RF deck from an HP 8568A spectrum analyzer, the first microprocessor-controlled SA ever built. HP first shipped it in ’79; this one was made in ’83. It’s a relatively-significant instrument, just due to the way it blew everything else out of the water back then (see the HP Journal issue on the 8568A at ftp://ftp.agilent.com/pub/manuals/HPJournal/ ). It took HP several years to bring the 8568A to production; it was probably the hairiest RF/digital design project of its time.
The -A series used a proprietary controller from HP’s desktop computer division; the later -B series had the same RF hardware but went to an 8 MHz 68000.