EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff => Topic started by: westfw on March 20, 2018, 08:51:58 am
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Suppose I am a hobbyist with some basic test equipment (an oscilloscope) and parts, and I'd like to do some basically qualitative or comparison of RF emissions of home-built projects. Nothing that would pass for actual product testing, of course, but ... something that would allow you to look at a PCB vs a breadboard, or "look at how emissions go up if I attach a 6inch wire to the micro's crystal oscillator output!", or (perhaps most importantly?) "this is terrible" vs "this doesn't look too bad."
I guess it'd essentially be a sort of broad-spectrum radio receiver with a "received power" indication?
Is that possible? Reasonable to construct from ordinary parts? I don't really care about specific frequencies (I don't think.) Just sort of overall "leakiness"...
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What about using a laptop SDR with external antenna,that way you get to see amplitude and frequency and can make whatever probe suits your needs
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I use a cheap USB SA, an eBay calibrated RF generator and a microwave oven to do pre-testing.
A microwave oven is not an effective Faraday cage, except at 2.4 GHz due to how it relies upon the geometry of the door flange being a quarter-wave trap. You'd be better off taking a metal toolbox or filing cabinet and adding some sort of conductive gasketing / contacts to the openings.