I have watched that lecture by Walter in the past, among other ones of his. However, it doesn't provide the data I'm interested in unless I guesstimate it. I've tried to do this on a few other videos with similar demonstrations, but it's unsatisfactory.
I've been wondering if part of my issue the way I'm interpreting the values from the detector diode. I'm merely hooking up a volt meter to it, while the gunnplexer itself has the diode shunted to ground via a 1k resistor and a zener (it was there when I bought it).
Per
https://www.qsl.net/in3otd/electronics/power_detectors/power_detectors.html "As known, the diode detector output is proportional to the square of the input voltage/linear with the input power at low power levels and becomes proportional to the peak voltage/square root of input power at higher levels."
I'm still trying to wrap my head around that, and how relevant it is. Like I said before, the results are the same regardless of the distance between the tx and rx (which does have an effect on the baseline voltage reading).
Tangential to this, I got my couple of "Ku" satellite LNBs in the mail, which I ordered new from amazon for ~$10 each. I was a bit premature in my purchase, neglecting to realize such new and cheap parts were highly unlikely to use dielectric resonators or really much of any discrete circuitry, making electronic mods pretty much a no-go. To top it off, naturally many of the passives are among the smallest SMD sizes available. I then thought that *maybe* I could hook it up to my TinySA Ultra and use that to measure received power, but in the almost non-existent spec sheet for the nearly all-in-one LNB IC, it states that it does some automatic gain nonsense, so there goes that idea too
The only usable component may be the waveguide, but then I need to figure out the electronics, and I don't currently have a suitable LO source, mixer or LNA. Maybe I should just go the diode detector route?