SA Demo Ideas

[mbtronix]

Hi guys,

For my undergrad capstone my group and I designed a swept spectrum analyzer. We are in the process of characterizing the complete signal chain right now, and are considering ideas on how to demo it for the college tech expo.

Does anyone have any ideas that might be more interesting than looking at the FM band or hooking up a sig-gen to it? BTW, its bandwidth is from DC to 2G

[w2aew]

Hi guys,

For my undergrad capstone my group and I designed a swept spectrum analyzer. We are in the process of characterizing the complete signal chain right now, and are considering ideas on how to demo it for the college tech expo.

Does anyone have any ideas that might be more interesting than looking at the FM band or hooking up a sig-gen to it? BTW, its bandwidth is from DC to 2G

Maybe take a look at the harmonic content of various signal types (square wave, triangle wave, etc.) and show that the dBc measurements of the harmonic magnitudes match up with the theory for each waveform type.

Measure pulsed RF waveforms, and discuss the affects of RBW vs. pulse width and the results you get in the spectrum measurements.

[Richard Head]

Extract the sawtooth freq ramp output and feed it to an external sweep generator. You now have a tracking generator that can be used to characterise filters, attenuators etc.

[mbtronix]

Thanks for the idea Richard! That would be pretty interesting to do.

I am using a PLL/VCO synthesizer from ADI, so I do not have an analog tuning voltage that I believe you are talking about.

Marshall