I'm working on a personal project in order to learn more about RF, in particular up in the 2.4GHz ISM band.
So I'm having a go at building an RF front end (LNA/PA) for a Wifi chipset to hopefully increase its performance. Only it doesn't have switching control outputs for the LNA/PA.
It seems simple enough to build a coupler and feed a detector circuit to trigger when the chipset is transmitting, but my question is how would one go about measuring the switching performance in terms of time to switch on and off?
My lab is kind of setup for digital and analog sensor work apart from a USB VNA, so is there any way to observe this on a 200MHz DSO? Is some sort of down-converter the answer?
Any points in the right direction would be great.