Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, good afternoon. Everyone. Thanks for coming
Rodgers RLE Forum: nice turnout
Rodgers RLE Forum: and
Rodgers RLE Forum: hopefully, you'll find this interesting. I don't know. Most people, I imagine, in here have used that
Rodgers RLE Forum: Keyside offering, but we've got a really nice instrument here that's available for your use, and this will help you
Rodgers RLE Forum: do some amplifier measurements. So that's going to be the objective of our presentation here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: This instrument operates up to 67 Gigahertz, and has some familiarity with
Rodgers RLE Forum: offering a different frequency ranges. You jump into different connector heights, you know, lower frequencies, sma, or 3 and a half millimeter, and then, after 40 gigahertz, you have 2.9 2 connectors, and then above that there's a sea change. They're no longer inter
Rodgers RLE Forum: connectorable mechanically, and then you go to 2.4 and 1.8 5 that gets you 2.4 gets you to 50 gigahertz, 1.8 5 gets you to 67.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So typically what you have to do is on this issue instance. It's a 1.8 5. You need 1.8 5 cables and then adapters to get to
Rodgers RLE Forum: whatever your dut is. If your dut like this one is just using basically sma connectors because it's a lower frequency device.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So the alternative which I got and they can be a pair of cables with a 1.8 5 female on this end, and a 2.9 2 on this end, so that eliminates the hassle with adapters generally. If you can avoid adapters, you should, because they're constantly going to be loosening up on you. There's also going to be reflections every time you add an adapter. And
Rodgers RLE Forum: the normal vector error correction will take care of that. But it's just one additional amount of reflections that can come back to bite you. Because if the temperature changes in the room or other conditions change.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Those reflections will no longer be perfectly canceled by the calibration, and it'll need to eventually ripple in your your measurement traces that sort of thing.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So just kind of like a little
Rodgers RLE Forum: preface. Here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: we can get right into the presentation. So so we're gonna be demonstrating amplifier measurements using, I'm calling a basic zna setup. So this is where you have a low enough power device that pretty much you can use the instrument straight away. Don't have to worry about additional attenuators or things like that. Don't have to worry about letting the smoke out of the instrument. That sort of thing with too much high power.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so we'll be evaluating. We start out with this. We want to look at the dut and the Zna parameters to make sure there's a match.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And this is now, this is pretty much typically the procedure that I'll use if I'm looking at trying to test some device. So you gotta look and make sure that your zna matches up with your dut if your dut needs to operate the 40 gig, and you've only got a 26 gigahertz box. It's gonna be a problem.
Rodgers RLE Forum: very simple way of looking at it. And then we want to consider some possible constraints.
Rodgers RLE Forum: After that we'll jump into actually performing a calibration
Rodgers RLE Forum: to support our measurements. Today we'll do an S parameter cal, which is pretty typical. We remove the loss and the phase between the instrument out to the point where you're connecting to a dut.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and we'll follow that up with a power calibration. Since we're doing an amplifier a lot of times you're interested in what's my actual power, and we'll calibrate both the receivers, and we'll calibrate the source as well.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And then we'll yeah. Could we pause for just a second? Could you tell me what your IP address is on mine? Yeah, for the Wi-fi. Yeah. Sure
Rodgers RLE Forum: I will end to throw this out.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Hmm.
Rodgers RLE Forum: are you doing a recording? Yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, it's 1825, 2632,
Rodgers RLE Forum: 2632.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay. Thanks.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay. Is there any questions you wanted to ask. First, st while you're kind of pause.
Rodgers RLE Forum: no, I want to trace those up first.st Okay, so just give me just a second look at that. Okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: all right, go ahead, Greg. Sorry for the interruption. No problem
Rodgers RLE Forum: down here. Then we'll be configuring some measurements after we have the calibration performed. So very basically, usually, anytime, you do an amplifier. The 1st thing you want to make sure is that it's working that you have gain out of it. So we'll do some gain measurements, typical input and output match measurements. OS parameters very straightforward stuff. Then we'll get into some of the deeper
Rodgers RLE Forum: want to do a power sweep and do a compression point measurement.
Rodgers RLE Forum: We'll look at harmonics, too.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and we'll do something called swept gain compression. So conventional power, sweep and compression point starts at a particular frequency, and then you just run the power up and you look at where the input power and the output power begin to diverge. And then there's a 1 dB, difference. Obviously, you reach the compression point.
Rodgers RLE Forum: The swept gain compression does that over a range of frequencies. So it's a way of getting comprehensive information out of the equipment very quickly, and you can do hundreds of frequency points if you want, but those are the things we'll look at. And in the process we'll be exercising different aspects of the user interface on Cna today.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, any questions, yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: right?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Can you?
Rodgers RLE Forum: So very briefly, the kind of game we're talking about is a power game. Just 10 log. 10 of the output power over the input power.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Nothing nothing new here, folks this will be the configuration very simply. We'll just connect an amplifier between Port One and port 2 of our instrument.
Rodgers RLE Forum: We do number those ports. Kind of weirdly so. Port one port 3, port 2, port 4. And the reason for that is primarily because well, couple of reasons.
Rodgers RLE Forum: for differential measurements. Port one and 3 become differential
Rodgers RLE Forum: port, one or logical port one, and similarly port 2 and Port 4 become logical. Port 2. There's also stuff that goes on in the background, depending on the instrument that you have port one and Port 2 may be sharing a generator
Rodgers RLE Forum: and port 3 and 4, maybe sharing a different generator and for doing things like imd measurements for modulation distortion. We need 2 cones.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Internally, we connect the generator from Port 3 into port one. So you have 2 tones that come out of port, one
Rodgers RLE Forum: in this particular box. We actually have 4 separate generators. Any of them can be used as just like a separate signal generator whatever. If you want completely independent, there's also a 5th output on the back that's serve as a generator.
Rodgers RLE Forum: That one only goes up to 26 Gigahertz. But hey, it's still you could park it at a frequency. You can have it sweeping any range. It doesn't have to correspond with the
Rodgers RLE Forum: frequency range you're speaking here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's very flexible. It becomes pretty much a Swiss army knife of of capability.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So
Rodgers RLE Forum: actually, here, though this is the actual part we're going to be looking at today.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: does it have the coupler like the directional couplers on every port? So you can do like both directions. Parameters on each quarter do something. No, no, it's got full.
Rodgers RLE Forum: a directional coupler behind every port and receivers behind every port. There's a reference receiver measuring what's coming out and a measurement receiver to see what's being reflected back.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And every 4 good question excellent.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So this is the device we'll be testing. It's this Rfa
Rodgers RLE Forum: art here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And
Rodgers RLE Forum: so typically, all right, somebody hands me a heart. They either have some lab data or some simulation data or a data sheets like this.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'm down here. I left. Okay, well, what's the frequency range that we want to operate over?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Well, this one spec for 600 Meg or 4.2 gigahertz. Okay? So
Rodgers RLE Forum: some of the questions that come up and the V and a cover, the required frequency range
Rodgers RLE Forum: absolutely in this case, what about harmonics? Are harmonics even required?
Rodgers RLE Forum: So that could be a a consideration.
Rodgers RLE Forum: In this case we'll go up to the 3rd harmonic. You'll see that in a later slide.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, next thing we look at is the game, because we want to make sure we're not over driving the device and not over driving the port
Rodgers RLE Forum: that we're going into. So in this case again, it's about 21 Dd.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Roughly across the the range. This is usually a small signal gain as well.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then the aqua power here shows up at plus 16
Rodgers RLE Forum: avm.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So then, we usually run these questions, so how much power can Z. And 8 or 2 handle? It's actually printed on the front of the instrument. It's
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'm a liar. It's generally you don't want to go over like
Rodgers RLE Forum: plus 30, I think, plus 30 zaps would kind of
Rodgers RLE Forum: damage point
Rodgers RLE Forum: in practice, probably like plus 20 is more favorable. I think the thing, too, is that we do have some attenuators that are available on the inside, because against the issues, with the possibility of compressing the receivers.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And we'll look at that shortly.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So with plus 16 at the output, 8 and 21 dB,
Rodgers RLE Forum: that means that our input level that we want to drive this amplifier with is like around minus 5 dbm.
Rodgers RLE Forum: that's that's pretty easy for this instrument. But other questions that come up depending on what you're testing, what's is the power sweep range of the Vna generator.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And obviously you're talking. If this is plus 16 dvm, it's probably still oh, that that is at the one dB point.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And so the game may go up a little bit higher. 22 dB. As you bring the power down lower and typically, I'll exercise any amplifier at the beginning, just at a very low level. But in this case I probably go with the minus 20 Dbm, just to make sure everything is focusing. Okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: great. Could we pause one more time?
Rodgers RLE Forum: So if you've been switched to hardline on your laptop.
Rodgers RLE Forum: then it might be a protocol issue.
Rodgers RLE Forum: apparently the box.
Rodgers RLE Forum: hey? Within.
Rodgers RLE Forum: it's just the Wi-fi version. It's a theory
Rodgers RLE Forum: he thinks this might fix it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But you have to switch your laptop. Turn the Wi-fi off. So it's gonna definitely use. But make sure that Ethernet is fired up 1st before you switch off, or that will happen.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, you're still there, thank you.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, yeah, tell me that idea.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's like it's still the same one, or is your Wi-fi off?
Rodgers RLE Forum: It could very well be the same IP. But
Rodgers RLE Forum: just as long as your Wi-fi is off, that's all that happens. Yeah, that Wi-fi is off. Okay? Good. So okay, now, looks like I've got a different.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And then do I do that one more time
Rodgers RLE Forum: have to refresh
Rodgers RLE Forum: you. Walk through the Id config. One more time to refresh.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and it's still done sort of differently
Rodgers RLE Forum: different. Yeah, this is different. On 2, 50 pulls it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah, it was 32 before. So 2, 54. Now,
Rodgers RLE Forum: not stupid.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay. Now see if you can find your box.
Rodgers RLE Forum: There you go
Rodgers RLE Forum: quite a quite a whiff.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Think it was just their cable whipping the, you know.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Is it? Seeing it
Rodgers RLE Forum: big names.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, we're getting errors.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and also on this box occasionally it'll bring up you asking to. You know, it needs a password for for things. It's always the same password. 89,
Rodgers RLE Forum: 41, 29.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'm sure I'll have to ask you that again.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But that's okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So
Rodgers RLE Forum: it should be able to see it should work. Yeah. But think he tried not too.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: 2.
Rodgers RLE Forum: This.
Rodgers RLE Forum: that's stupid.
Rodgers RLE Forum: No.
Rodgers RLE Forum: actually.
Rodgers RLE Forum: yeah. The la, I mean, if this doesn't work. Last thing we could try real quick is
Rodgers RLE Forum: you connect with that thing directly to the box, but with your Wi-fi on, so that the zoom stays on Wi-fi
Rodgers RLE Forum: irony problem you. You turn your Wi-fi back on
Rodgers RLE Forum: so that the zoom is going through Wi-fi.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then, when you connect your your Ethernet port to the box. It should recognize that it's a patch and not a network, not the other network. You should be able to do 2 network at once
Rodgers RLE Forum: write this stuff down. Let's see.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I mean, I think it
Rodgers RLE Forum: should work because it's when I am on my computer to Wi-fi, and then I plug Ethernet into one of the other boxes I can see the box, so go our only just turn, turn your Wi-fi on.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and and then disconnect the Internet. That's the live button.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Once it once it gets.
Rodgers RLE Forum: you're on early now. Okay, so disconnect the Ethernet cable from your computer. Now, plug that
Rodgers RLE Forum: now, blue.
Rodgers RLE Forum: that
Rodgers RLE Forum: it's okay. It's okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Alright.
Rodgers RLE Forum: pull the other end.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Now you have to recheck, because now it'll be getting its ids from your computer.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Here we had 2, 5, 4
Rodgers RLE Forum: address
Rodgers RLE Forum: and tried to get it back. Yeah, it's only gonna give me
Rodgers RLE Forum: it's Wi-fi, or
Rodgers RLE Forum: okay, alright. Well, we'll have to solve this problem another time
Rodgers RLE Forum: browser, early
Rodgers RLE Forum: separate!
Rodgers RLE Forum: What's the downside of
Rodgers RLE Forum: what the router do?
Rodgers RLE Forum: It may the network may turn off and may not do anything. I just talked to the city.
Rodgers RLE Forum: shoot the video and try and turn it off. The time on
Rodgers RLE Forum: you use your laptop to connect.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Do you usually connect when not connected to? I connect my router into your
Rodgers RLE Forum: well, they don't like that because it creates weird face back.
Rodgers RLE Forum: There should be sitting down here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: If- if it if it hands out. Dhcp. Addresses. It will be blocked
Rodgers RLE Forum: to the instrument, and it won't. It won't be on like zoom that long. But
Rodgers RLE Forum: if you have
Rodgers RLE Forum: well, we could go back to my- my low tech solution, just pointing that
Rodgers RLE Forum: you wanna go just go on Wi-fi for the slides. Yeah, go back on Wi-fi. So slides are working, and I'll get something to point at the screen.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Say, Hello, 1998.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So
Rodgers RLE Forum: is it a way that we take pictures of the slide. Yeah. And we can also if it's something right
Rodgers RLE Forum: side of the employees
Rodgers RLE Forum: where this is our 1st
Rodgers RLE Forum: forum.
Rodgers RLE Forum: then we'll be back and we'll have these ironed out before us.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Do you guys often attend those forums at university.
Rodgers RLE Forum: seen the emails for other times, and there's like a fast wizard
Rodgers RLE Forum: pretty awesome.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But it's
Rodgers RLE Forum: I can feel the knowledge.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Rodgers RLE Forum: For next week we will have a second.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You don't have a
Rodgers RLE Forum: oh, they do. Yeah, yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: let's see, okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: when you're doing.
Rodgers RLE Forum: that'd be great.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Are you playing this stuff?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Not really.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I see. Okay, I see. Okay, which is the answer.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So jump back into it
Rodgers RLE Forum: at all. Right? So
Rodgers RLE Forum: talked about power levels. And now we're ready to begin the calibration.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So for this kind of an application, basically, since I know I want to get an accurate power level measurement of the of my dut.
Rodgers RLE Forum: We're gonna be using our cal plus unknown through open, short match
Rodgers RLE Forum: Cal with an auto cal, so that creates a PUOS. M. Type calibration.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And the nice thing is, if you plug in both of those items. So these are both connected via USB, either the rear panel or the front panel. I just plug them into the rear to have less cabling lying around here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: What will happen is
Rodgers RLE Forum: it'll all it'll automatically recognize. Oh, you have 2 plugged in so probably by default. You want to do that type of calibration.
Rodgers RLE Forum: That's that. And then let's see.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So we want to. Actually, before going into calibration, we want to set our frequency range that we're interested in operating over. So in this case the dut was operating 600 Meg. To 4.2
Rodgers RLE Forum: gigahertz, so I like to see how devices kind of roll off outside their normal spec range. So I'll go 500 megahertz to 4.3 gigahertz. But then I want to go to the 3rd harmonic. So my frequency suite is going to be shown here 500 Meg. To 12.9 gig, and we'll use a frequency set size of 50 megahertz.
Rodgers RLE Forum: This you can use when you
Rodgers RLE Forum: initially preset the instrument, you've got 201 points. It's just what has historically been used since the 1st Vna is in the seventies when memory is very expensive, but you can go up to 100,001 points if you want on the trace
Rodgers RLE Forum: do that. I'm going to use one kilohertz bandwidth for the calibration
Rodgers RLE Forum: and the standard power count.
Rodgers RLE Forum: which is minus 10 dbm.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And then I'll add source level, because when you do a power count by default, you.
Rodgers RLE Forum: you get the receivers calibrated. What it basically does is by plugging it into the end of a cable
Rodgers RLE Forum: you will.
Rodgers RLE Forum: The generator will be putting out an amount of power.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It'll take a sample of that power through the directional coupler. The outgoing directional coupler into the reference receiver that's usually found about 10 dB. Or so. But whatever that level is, it creates a lookup table.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And basically the power sensor says, Okay, Vna, at 500 Megahertz, this is what minus 10 Dbm tastes like, because I'm getting minus 10 right here. So it looks at the voltage level that it's seeing at its receiver, and says, Oh, okay, I'm going to just mark this as minus 10. And so it creates that kind of a lookup table.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So then, after you want to do measurements, you no longer need this power sensor. You're just using the reference information from that internal receiver which is a lot faster in general, and also offers a much wider dynamic range.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You know, power sensors. This is wide bin. It's a 40 gigahertz sensor. So it's it's living. DC, the daylight. And you know, that's a lot of noise you're letting into. That's gonna limit. How low signal level you can really measure
Rodgers RLE Forum: before it just disappears. If you're using the power sensor, and this one is better than most. The new technology will go down minus 70. Dbm took us 20 Dbm. Which is really good. But again, as it gets lower in power, it's doing a lot more averages, and it's going to take longer time to make those measurements. So that's why it's nice to just get it out of the picture. And then you have one. Stop
Rodgers RLE Forum: the instrument as a standalone.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So let's do that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'll do. Here. I just start from a preset
Rodgers RLE Forum: and
Rodgers RLE Forum: see
Rodgers RLE Forum: Steve you. Wanna I don't know if you can
Rodgers RLE Forum: bring in.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then we might do a live next door.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Give me a second.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Alright.
Rodgers RLE Forum: alright! But he's our
Rodgers RLE Forum: slightly better.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Also a good idea to use a torque calibration.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Is it the same score branch for like an sma? Or is it different for this transfer? I think it's the same
Rodgers RLE Forum: use.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah, we we don't really get into different torque values until you go to like a 1 connector, which is really delicate.
Rodgers RLE Forum: All right. So I did a preset.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I'm going to change my start up in the right corner, start frequency. Set 500 Megahertz
Rodgers RLE Forum: hurts.
Rodgers RLE Forum: hey? Stop frequency.
Rodgers RLE Forum: 12.9
Rodgers RLE Forum: gerhurtz.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then for setting the frequency steps.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I go to Sweet Button
Rodgers RLE Forum: Channel Group here, sweep.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And
Rodgers RLE Forum: right now, by default, it's showing 201 points corresponds to frequency. Step size of 62 Megahertz. The easiest thing to do is just click on frequency step size. Just set that to 50.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Megahertz.
Rodgers RLE Forum: okay?
Rodgers RLE Forum: And the other thing I mentioned, like the
Rodgers RLE Forum: bandwidth. So under the power bandwidth average fee press that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and the second soft key down on the right is bandwidth. We just change that to one kilohertz.
Rodgers RLE Forum: have it done there. So I'm ready at this point to get into calibration.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Any questions?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, I press the cal button.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then we have a lot of like cal options on here. But basically, there's 1 that says, configure start Cal, second one down.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Let's pick that one.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and
Rodgers RLE Forum: that we
Rodgers RLE Forum: maybe just for people that we're moving the and the
Rodgers RLE Forum: TMI.
Rodgers RLE Forum: From your computer.
Rodgers RLE Forum: if you unplug it to plug it so that we want to know that at least see the
Rodgers RLE Forum: that has issue with it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yes, I'm not even sure.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay. Well, anyway, on this screen, and
Rodgers RLE Forum: sure nobody can see it from here. But
Rodgers RLE Forum: by default, if
Rodgers RLE Forum: says, Okay, well, right now, it's showing a calibration time. Reflect open short, which we don't want.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It only has one port selected port one. So I'm going to call this click on Port 2.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I don't have 2,
Rodgers RLE Forum: and I'm going to change the connector style to 2.9 2
Rodgers RLE Forum: So now 4, 1, 4, 2, say 2.9 2
Rodgers RLE Forum: Receiver power. Cal.
Rodgers RLE Forum: we're going to do that on.
Rodgers RLE Forum: or
Rodgers RLE Forum: or 2
Rodgers RLE Forum: chat open.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Let me change my calibration
Rodgers RLE Forum: style. I'm not sure why
Rodgers RLE Forum: awesome.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and let me
Rodgers RLE Forum: something else
Rodgers RLE Forum: here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: back down a little
Rodgers RLE Forum: weird, so I don't know who's used it in the past.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so I'm going to do what's called
Rodgers RLE Forum: factory reset. So under the windows, button
Rodgers RLE Forum: starting off, you ever see weird stuff.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You can go under the windows, button.
Rodgers RLE Forum: find your Zna rns Z.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Cna, and there's a reset factory state.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Says instrument can't see their instrument.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Reset the factory.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Sorry
Rodgers RLE Forum: there, and just double. Click. The
Rodgers RLE Forum: R and S.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Go
Rodgers RLE Forum: firmware
Rodgers RLE Forum: back in
Rodgers RLE Forum: back in action.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Reset.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Sorry 500
Rodgers RLE Forum: never hurts. Stop.
Rodgers RLE Forum: We're told
Rodgers RLE Forum: your hurts.
Rodgers RLE Forum: 3,900 steps
Rodgers RLE Forum: so.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And how you
Rodgers RLE Forum: that bandwidth 20 kilohertz?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Well.
Rodgers RLE Forum: okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now we're seeing what I would expect
Rodgers RLE Forum: see from here. It says PUOS. Sound
Rodgers RLE Forum: should say automatically.
Rodgers RLE Forum: brought up Port One and port 2, and by default it's doing reference. Receiver Cal and Port one.
Rodgers RLE Forum: That's fine, because as part of this process, it actually, once you calibrate one port, it calibrates all the other ports. All the ports that you're using in this case would do the receiver behind Port 2 as well.
Rodgers RLE Forum: which is very nice.
Rodgers RLE Forum: just
Rodgers RLE Forum: because of the error correction, and knows how much loss there is in the cables and just calculates that out.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And we want to do source leveling. So like, I say, the receiver power cow only accurately calibrates the receiver, the source is still going to be plus or minus or so, and generally for
Rodgers RLE Forum: amplifier measurement, you'd want to nail that power level. So I'm going to just click here on source leveling.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and the checkbox is on.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and that's all I need to do. So I can do start count
Rodgers RLE Forum: now in this window.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It says, start Cal, sweep on the left, detect ports and start Cal or detect port assignment. Usually use the middle one.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Because I deliberately, you know, normally, you figure
Rodgers RLE Forum: port. One of the analyzer is going to connect to port one of your Cal unit.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I flipped them deliberately, just for sheer fun of it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: because what happens when you do the tech ports and start count, it'll actually figure out how it's connected.
Rodgers RLE Forum: See
Rodgers RLE Forum: with that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Now, it's showing Port 2 is connected to the auto Cal. Port one and vice versa.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and
Rodgers RLE Forum: starting to do the count
Rodgers RLE Forum: doesn't take very long with an audit calendar.
Rodgers RLE Forum: particularly with only 206 points. It's really not that. So it's done with the auto count
Rodgers RLE Forum: portion. Yes, parameter calibration portion.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Ow.
Rodgers RLE Forum: that's all.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's telling me to connect Port one of the analyzer and the power sensor
Rodgers RLE Forum: here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And I'll start this calibration suite
Rodgers RLE Forum: takes a little longer again, because our sensors are are slower.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But now that's done, it's got a check box
Rodgers RLE Forum: here and now I'll just click, apply.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then there'll be a 3rd menu. This is when we said we wanted the sources or the generator to be
Rodgers RLE Forum: level, calibrated.
Rodgers RLE Forum: This comes up. And so we want to perform a source flatness. And this is going to be m. 4, 1, because that's the one that's going to be driving our device.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I click on. That brings up. This just tells me source flatness will be added with smart account.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay?
Rodgers RLE Forum: And you you could connect the DUT.
Rodgers RLE Forum: To the the port, particularly if it has a poor match, and then the other team will
Rodgers RLE Forum: take into account the fact that it's got kind of a bad match, and it'll work to level the power input in spite of that bad match. In this case
Rodgers RLE Forum: it's a pretty darn good match, and what I'm doing is by leaving the power sensor attached. Power sensors have very good. Vswr, the return box. So it's about
Rodgers RLE Forum: 40 dB, typically return loss. So I'll just leave it connected
Rodgers RLE Forum: and just hit start.
Rodgers RLE Forum: How sweet!
Rodgers RLE Forum: So do it a few times. You can see here that's minus 10 Dbm in the center there. And this source flatness wants to get that within plus or minus a 10th of a Dp.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so you can see those red lines indicate a plus or minus 10th of a dB, we really pretty well nailed it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: That's it. So now I apply this.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and that's now applying the entire account.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So this channel that we're using now is calibrated. Something I like to do at this point is to save that off, so I can reuse it for other measurements, or if I did a preset, I can just bring that cow back. I don't have to go through this process anymore.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And if you want to test a different device as long as you remain within that cal range frequency range. It's fine. You don't have to be at the same exact frequency points. If your frequency grid is shifted.
Rodgers RLE Forum: it just interpolate, based on the calibration values.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So to do that
Rodgers RLE Forum: the next button down here this is, we came out. We're still in this calibration mode. The Cal button over here is still blue.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So over here,
Rodgers RLE Forum: see, we're on power Cal settings. I'm gonna go next one down user count.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So user, Cal, is where we put our calibration manager down here at the bottom.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and there's a calibration paper.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So this is the current channel that has been calibrated. I'm going to just add him into full.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and I'll just rename them. Our purposes here mit
Rodgers RLE Forum: fine.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now we'll be able to reappree. Use that as we go along.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, so now close that off.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now we're ready to make some measurements.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Steve. Still here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: you can shrink his
Rodgers RLE Forum: rainbow. Actually.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Alright.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yep.
Rodgers RLE Forum: operation dialog. So now we're gonna set our power to a small signal range
Rodgers RLE Forum: minus 25 ppm.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'll increase the bandwidth to 10 kilohertz. We use one kilohertz during calibration. That's just to ensure a really good signal to noise ratio. But you want that for calibration. Obviously, if you're doing something very critical, maybe you want to go down to 10 hertz bandwidth.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But for most applications either the default 10 kilohertz, or one kilohertz is is funny, sufficient, but for the actual measurement now we use 10 kilohertz bandwidth. We'll set our F staff at 4.3 gigahertz, because at this point we only want to go over the normal fundamental frequency range of this with 50 Megahertz staff
Rodgers RLE Forum: worry about getting to that 18 gigahertz or that 12.9 gigahertz later on, when we're doing the harmonic measurements.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So attach the dut by DC power, and then this step will do. Gain input and output.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, you are
Rodgers RLE Forum: almost out of regulation time, but I have the room and everything for another half hour.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Anybody can say, please save if you have to go down like.
Rodgers RLE Forum: how long does a cow last for like? If you turn it off. Yes, it is. If you let the instrument warm up. Well, you know, in that case I would probably give it a good half hour. Warm up. We're just going to be reusing the cow.
Rodgers RLE Forum: depends on how good your cables are, how much you're moving them around.
Rodgers RLE Forum: How consistent your temp the temperature is in the room that you're using.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So people can typically get
Rodgers RLE Forum: complete.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You can use a single panel for a week without any hiccups
Rodgers RLE Forum: again. It it's on a
Rodgers RLE Forum: use case basis, you know.
Rodgers RLE Forum: just depending what your environment is like, and pretty much you'll be able to tell a good thing to do, maybe, is to save on the S. Parameters from
Rodgers RLE Forum: previous day's work or something, and then you can import that trace back and do a new measurement and see if they still line up. Well.
Rodgers RLE Forum: okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so this is one of our power supplies here. Channel one
Rodgers RLE Forum: voltage.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's not responsible.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'll replace my current
Rodgers RLE Forum: boom.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Let me see.
Rodgers RLE Forum: let's try and drop it on.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and
Rodgers RLE Forum: and they're start
Rodgers RLE Forum: still, 500. Meg.
Rodgers RLE Forum: stop, let's go to 4.3.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, and there's the device essentially.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so that's a starting point. I can. Of course
Rodgers RLE Forum: you want. Now, Steve, you can vote or only
Rodgers RLE Forum: bring it back. But thank you.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And so we have markers. I can just click on the marker button puts one right in the center of the screen. You can with your finger the ground if you want where you want to go. We also have a nice thing. Trace statistics that you can use to find out things about what you're measuring. So that's under trace config button in the right.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You come down here to trace statistics.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Min. Max and peak to peak so kind of small, but shows the minimum gain, Max and the peak to peak variation. We could also do like mean and standard deviation, and that to it and that exclusively.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So it's a nice handy function by default. It's going to go over the entire measurement range
Rodgers RLE Forum: in this case, though, we know that we exceeded the spec range. So I can change this range around
Rodgers RLE Forum: says evaluation range here instead of full span, I'll create a new range
Rodgers RLE Forum: or
Rodgers RLE Forum: 600 million
Rodgers RLE Forum: 29
Rodgers RLE Forum: 4.1
Rodgers RLE Forum: turn the range blinds on. And so now we just be doing measurements within that
Rodgers RLE Forum: particular spec range.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Any questions on that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, the other thing, too, if you want, if you can move a little closer, that would help or something online.
Rodgers RLE Forum: All right. So let's add a couple more traces, and this is done very easily on our instrument at the very top. There's
Rodgers RLE Forum: this button here which says, Trace plus prc plus.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So
Rodgers RLE Forum: I press on it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and I drag down
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then select. Okay, let's look at S. 1 1,
Rodgers RLE Forum: and I can do it again. Actually, in this case, since this is highlighted. I can just press that trace button again. It'll put another trace down here right now. It says 1 1 as well. Just copy the previous one.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I can just click on my measurement button
Rodgers RLE Forum: and by default at the top of this list in the center here it's S. Parameters. So this one I just want to be S. 22.
Rodgers RLE Forum: That's do, too.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, so now we're looking at s, 1, 1 and s, 2, 2,
Rodgers RLE Forum: one of the issues you sometimes confront is the fact that okay, each trace can have independent scaling.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and sometimes you get things
Rodgers RLE Forum: done
Rodgers RLE Forum: independently. So you just look at it. And you think you're looking at a constant scale for one of those traces.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and it's going to be wrong because it's whichever traces highlighted. That's the side scale that it pertains to.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But fortunately we have a nice tool that can just harmonize that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: lock them together.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So we want to do something with scaling, so I'll come up here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Upper, right? Trace group is a button called scale.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and there's
Rodgers RLE Forum: scale cubbling.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And this button here, couple traces and diagram 2
Rodgers RLE Forum: to my tree screen. So let's do that for company.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now, if I move one of them.
Rodgers RLE Forum: the other one moves as well.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I changed the oh, what Dv per set.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You can also get that back as well. So that's that's a handy, handy capability.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Questions on that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: alright. Let's see what else we have here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Alright.
Rodgers RLE Forum: this phone. Actually, I'm doing gain with the default minus 10 dbm.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so I could change
Rodgers RLE Forum: We'll do that later. We look at changing the power and see if we can, really doesn't change a whole lot. Let's go to the next one. So this is just showing kind of what we have. I just put one over the the other, but you can put them side by side, whatever break it up. However, we want.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So now we're going to add a power sweep to this.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay? So we're going to add a new channel.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And then we want to use our existing calibration data and just apply it to that channel.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's a nice thing.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Turn Rf. Off on all channels until we have things set up the way we want.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and I'll be changing my sweep to a power sweep on this new channel. I'll explain a little bit more about that
Rodgers RLE Forum: use minus 30 to minus 10 Dbm. Range, and the idea then is I'll work my way up to the one dB, compression point. But I'd like to start down in a charitable region, not hurting the dut, and we'll do the measurements just being 2.4 gigahertz. We could do it anywhere.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Then I'll turn the Rf. On for all the channels, and then I'll measure
Rodgers RLE Forum: couple of things. I want to look at the power I'm feeding to the amplifier, and we're going to see that as a power sweep.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And then we want to look at the power coming out of my device.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And then we also kind of want to look at what's happening to the gain of the device. So we'll add those kinds of traces.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then we'll apply a. p. 1 dB. Marker.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And using this, another feature that trace statistics that I showed you.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So, Emily.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I have to bring it up.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Let me see if I can read it
Rodgers RLE Forum: alright. So
Rodgers RLE Forum: thank you, sir.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: not better than that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah, it's fine. Thank you. Okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So we've talked about traces. We've talked about these diagram areas, you know, up here and down here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: the thing we haven't really talked about yet is channels. So
Rodgers RLE Forum: channels contain all the hardware settings of the instrument like for this current channel, which is channel one by default. We're doing a frequency sweep, but we've got certain receiver, if bandwidth set
Rodgers RLE Forum: things of that nature.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So now, if we want to do a power sweep where we're sweeping power at a single frequency. We need a new channel that would support that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, so I come down here. The grouping. There's a Channel group right here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I'm gonna click, click on channel config.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And I'm going to do a new channel. I'm just going to click on new channel.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So it starts out, it just creates a new trace
Rodgers RLE Forum: based on whoever was previously highlighted. Well, the other thing that's kind of nice. There's a back arrow up in the upper left hand corner. So if you do something like a mistake, you just go back one step, which again comes in kind of handy.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So let's say, we're gonna at least start with a channel up top here. So I'm gonna highlight him to make him the active trace.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now I'm going to save the chat.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So now, added a new channel. See, on the second line down there
Rodgers RLE Forum: over here, it says Channel 2
Rodgers RLE Forum: is the blue trace
Rodgers RLE Forum: so good we've got him. But I wanna put him in his own display area.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I'm just going to.
Rodgers RLE Forum: The trace is already highlighted. I'm going to hold down where it says, Trace 4 here
Rodgers RLE Forum: oops.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and I'm just gonna move him off to the right, and it puts him in his own
Rodgers RLE Forum: area. So now we've got trace channel one here and channel one running down here. And this guy in the right hand corner is Channel 2. So that's going to be our power suite.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So set that up. Let's see, first, st all right. I don't think it copied over my calibration data. So let's get the cal up. So I just have to go back to Cal. Use Cal.
Rodgers RLE Forum: account manager.
Rodgers RLE Forum: yeah. And right now on the left for channel 2, it just says, Dash, dash means there's no active. There's actually a factory, Cal, kind of run in the background, but it's not a valid one. So we want to use our mit Cal right there. So it's already highlighted. I'll just hit apply.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now it's running with that, and you'll see this gives you information on the highlighted Cal up here, date and time code when it was done, and the particulars about exactly what was calibrated. Frequency range number of points, stuff like that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So good we're done with that
Rodgers RLE Forum: calibrated.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And we're going to do a power sweeper. You might notice also, right now by default, since it's the new channel. It's a brand new one. We didn't copy anything.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and it's using the default settings of the instrument. 10 Meg. To 6 or 7 gigahertz for a sweet range, and because that exceeds what we did with the calibration
Rodgers RLE Forum: on the top, it says, Cow off so not a big deal.
Rodgers RLE Forum: but just for informational sake.
Rodgers RLE Forum: see? So you might ask, okay, well, why didn't we just do copy? You can copy a current channel to a new channel?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Well, I don't tend to do that because it's going to grab all the traces. So this new channel would have like 5 traces associated with it in one diagram area. Now, I mean, I can go, and I can delete them individually. But
Rodgers RLE Forum: this way, too, it shows you a little more about, you know, using account manager to bring over a calibration.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So all right, we need to change this now to an honest meeting.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So that's something associated with a sweep up here
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'll press my sweet button.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and it says.
Rodgers RLE Forum: suite type. Right here I'm going to go with a power suite and let me turn the Rf. Off just as kind of a safety thing
Rodgers RLE Forum: right on the very top line here. See that
Rodgers RLE Forum: there's an Rf on and off. So I'm just gonna click Rf on.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So now I can configure my squeeze and power levels, and everything should be all right.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Go back to sleep.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Establish this. I want sleep type.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You have to highlight the trace and the channel
Rodgers RLE Forum: that you want to affect now with new changes. So I'll click on power.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now, instead of sweeping frequency. We're sweeping power. So in terms of my stimulus up in the right hand corner here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: we're going to change our start and stop power range.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So the start power by default says, minus 25 dbm, I'm just going to make that like minus 30
Rodgers RLE Forum: friends.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and the stop power 0. Dbm, that's higher than our compression point, which was minus 5. So I'll go down to like minus 10
Rodgers RLE Forum: to start. Then we'll we'll work our way up, and we can see here. It says the Cw. Frequency is one gigahertz. We said we wanted to try 2.4, so I'll just click on that. Change it to 2
Rodgers RLE Forum: stupid.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Or, let's see.
Rodgers RLE Forum: all right.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So we're basically set up.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I can turn power on again.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So power comes on for all the channels
Rodgers RLE Forum: right now this is s. 2, 1 by default.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It should be pretty much flat across.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Looks like there is a wee little bit of compression happening towards the end slightly dipping down a little bit.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But the other thing we wanted to look at it's the input power and the output power. So let's get those traces.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I'm going to with this highlighted just going to add 2 traces. I'm going to click.
Rodgers RLE Forum: trace, trace twice. So I have 2 new traces.
Rodgers RLE Forum: 1st one, we'll let that be info power.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So we'll change what we're trying to measure with the measurement key right here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Click on that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now, by default. That's parameters at the top. But these wave quantity.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, and we're firms.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, stop me!
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's back! Oh, okay, great!
Rodgers RLE Forum: And we'll do the same thing with the next one we want to look at what's going into our receiver coming out of our 2. The way of going in is
Rodgers RLE Forum: the measurement wave that's referred to as our B wave versus the A wave that's coming out.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So we'll look at B 2 source port one.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, and the separation between them is going to be the game, the device.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so they can move them all. And I think I'm going to do the same. Locking
Rodgers RLE Forum: thing with the traces in here at least the the power traces.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So here I'm gonna go back to scale.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah. Fine
Rodgers RLE Forum: symbol trace coupling.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I'm going to couple tree 6
Rodgers RLE Forum: to trace 5.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Alright.
Rodgers RLE Forum: trace.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Hmm!
Rodgers RLE Forum: As it's something
Rodgers RLE Forum: we can also use a trace manager that'll accomplish the same thing. So trace 6.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I want to couple his scale. Trace 5.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Who's it?
Rodgers RLE Forum: They're both connected. I kind of did that because right now we've got a 10 dB. Per division set.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and I'd like to try to see a little more zoom in a little more.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So the scale
Rodgers RLE Forum: go back to the scale values scale for division right now is 10 dB, let's see if we go down to 5 dB, still, kind of see things things that are going on.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then for the s. 2, 1
Rodgers RLE Forum: that shouldn't be compressing a whole lot yet, but we'd like to see this instant compress.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I'm going to, since he's not tied to the others.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'm gonna change this down to about a 1. dB, per
Rodgers RLE Forum: staff.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: that's happening.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay?
Rodgers RLE Forum: So yeah, it looks like they're getting into a little bit of compression, because the it's a little lower at the end here with minus 10. So now we can play some more. Let's start changing around the
Rodgers RLE Forum: stop power here. So stop.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's not far when it's 10,
Rodgers RLE Forum: and you can see tail end of that. Now we're getting into compression
Rodgers RLE Forum: sometimes on these other traces.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You can also see some the output. It's kind of hard to see here. The one dB, compression isn't a whole lot.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so we can go to even minus 3 pm.
Rodgers RLE Forum: okay? And you get more
Rodgers RLE Forum: of a band in there.
Rodgers RLE Forum: you'll notice we also have
Rodgers RLE Forum: warning among says, basically measurement receiver overload reduce input power.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay? Because now we're getting into a point where we've got, we're driving too much power into our
Rodgers RLE Forum: DNA,
Rodgers RLE Forum: and we're gonna be compressing that receiver. So this compression? Is it coming from the dut, or is it coming from the instrumentation?
Rodgers RLE Forum: We can change that?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Go back to the power button.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And this power menu gives us access to a lot of things. It's kind of Swiss army knife thing.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and one of the things we can do is down here. Receiver, step attenuators the B 2. That's the one where we're forcing the power in right now is set to 10 dB, let's increase that attenuation. It automatically accounts for the fact that. Okay, now, I have more attenuation on that. It's been calibrated at the factory.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So we will click on the B 2,
Rodgers RLE Forum: and I'm going to increase him and watch what happens to this
Rodgers RLE Forum: trace here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: yes, through one trace.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Alright. Let me keep in a minute
Rodgers RLE Forum: change his scaling a little bit more.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Good morning
Rodgers RLE Forum: down here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and what I'll do is I'm going to create a memory trace just to see where we're starting from with this green trace of s. 2, 1 compression.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So to do that, it's something I want to do with the trace. So trace config.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And there's memory.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I just want to put attitude to new memory. So let's put a new memory trace. It's right behind the green trace, which you'll see in a second.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So now we'll go back to the power and that attenuator.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Let's increase the attenuation by
Rodgers RLE Forum: 5 to 80.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You can see. Now came up a little bit.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's gonna waste some more.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay? And then further.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And at a certain point, it's just not changing anymore.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So now with
Rodgers RLE Forum: 30 dB, into that B 2 receiver. We're not seeing any change. If I go back down to 25,
Rodgers RLE Forum: even though it looks like that's pretty much it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But that's going to impact.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You'll hear that
Rodgers RLE Forum: tick, Tock sound.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So what's happening again? Remember, we have 2 channels running with a different hardware
Rodgers RLE Forum: channel. One still has the other setting of
Rodgers RLE Forum: the B 2 receiver over here
Rodgers RLE Forum: of Handy the
Rodgers RLE Forum: whereas my new channel
Rodgers RLE Forum: is running with right now 25 dB,
Rodgers RLE Forum: so the easiest thing I do is just say, Okay, well, why don't we just have all channels run with the same amount of attenuation? And so just introduce this.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now channel one and channel 2 are both using 25. Gb.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so this is the receiver. Yeah, yeah. And I've got some. I got a slide that shows us a little more. What's going on? So, Emily, can we see? Can we swing it back to my slides?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: thanks.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So
Rodgers RLE Forum: this is what a typical port looks like behind these covers. We just have these looping plugs on the front. These are some different options that are available for it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And really, what's going on behind the scenes.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, here's where the signal comes into port. 2.
Rodgers RLE Forum: This is our
Rodgers RLE Forum: directional coupler right here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay? And then here's the source at the other end of it. So the source has its own attenuator. Equal step 0 to 70 v. Mechanical step Attenuator. We're really not using that in this application. Because we also have
Rodgers RLE Forum: 50 dB, just electronic control range on the generator. So you can do some crazy stuff. You can actually generate accurate signal level sounds like minus 1 20.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You need it for some big space pro type, application or something.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So signal comes out of source couples into the reference receiver for the forward going wave. Whatever's coming back into port. 2
Rodgers RLE Forum: comes in this way and goes down to the measurement receiver.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Obviously, since we have an amplifier facing Port 2, we have a lot of power. So what we've done is we've switched in this attenuator here in front of the receiver
Rodgers RLE Forum: so that we don't get the compression in this measurement receiver.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And I've got another diagram here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: This shows you ever wondered about this bathtub curve regarding measurement accuracy of any DNA. They all have this kind of a basic shape to them.
Rodgers RLE Forum: More.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, at the. You see, the power level.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so that corresponds to the transmission coefficient. The s. 21 gain or loss in dB,
Rodgers RLE Forum: and at the lower signal levels it's pretty flat, but eventually it kicks up.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Because at the lower signal levels you get into issues with
Rodgers RLE Forum: both a little bit of receiver linearity on the low end as well as reduced signal to noise ratio, so that will impact the phase. You'll have a little more uncertainty there, and the magnitude, uncertainty, the low end. Excuse me.
Rodgers RLE Forum: but at the high end where we get into this compression receiver compression. That's why it tends to kick up and you get more uncertainty at the high power levels.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So just to make you aware of that. The the zna that you have, I think, does a good job of
Rodgers RLE Forum: protecting you from that by giving you these warning messages for overdriving every single time.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, let's see.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So that was just I had separated out my game trace from the
Rodgers RLE Forum: we want to need 2 on this, but it's the same thing that we did here
Rodgers RLE Forum: on
Rodgers RLE Forum: next thing we could do, and we're almost out of time. I can quickly add some harmonics to show you how that's done. So we would need a new channel again
Rodgers RLE Forum: copy the current channel to new channel and do that. Change our measurement we want to look at by looking at B 2 source port p. 1, we're looking at our fundamental signal level cross frequency.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And then we can add a trace for the second harmonic power
Rodgers RLE Forum: and other trays with their harmonic power.
Rodgers RLE Forum: That's not gonna do.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And then at this point we can label the windows, but not gonna do that right now. So let's make him big.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Since
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'm going to be doing a frequency sweep.
Rodgers RLE Forum: it's probably easier to start with a frequency trace for my
Rodgers RLE Forum: channels.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I'll go back here to
Rodgers RLE Forum: Channel Config.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And
Rodgers RLE Forum: this time I'll just say, Okay, let's copy the current channel
Rodgers RLE Forum: and the diagram. It'll give us a new channel and a new diagram area.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So let me do that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay, so now this says, channel 3,
Rodgers RLE Forum: and it brought over all the traces associated with
Rodgers RLE Forum: Channel one. So we have 3 traces. Actually, that's not too bad, because we ultimately want to have 3 traces for the harmonics.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Great?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Alright! But since it's a different channel.
Rodgers RLE Forum: we're going to have to reconfigure our
Rodgers RLE Forum: suite range that sort of thing, so we'll leave it at 500 Meg. To 4.3 gig for the fundamental
Rodgers RLE Forum: sure.
Rodgers RLE Forum: which in this case, since we copied the channel, it should have copied the
Rodgers RLE Forum: calibration that it did
Rodgers RLE Forum: put it there.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So instead of s. 2, 1, let's just look at the fundamental power. That'll be the b 2, a 1 that we want to measure. So under the measurement, key up top.
Rodgers RLE Forum: that's weight quantity.
Rodgers RLE Forum: B, 2, source port one
Rodgers RLE Forum: very nice
Rodgers RLE Forum: right?
Rodgers RLE Forum: And we'll tie these 3 together, actually putting together shortly. So the next trace trace 9. We want that to be the second harmonic
Rodgers RLE Forum: so very easily. See under the wave one the next one down, says ratio harmonics.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I'll click that button.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and it says, down towards the bottom.
Rodgers RLE Forum: B, 2 second harmonic source for me.
Rodgers RLE Forum: that
Rodgers RLE Forum: and I'll highlight the 3rd one.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and let that be the 3rd harmonica.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now want to tie their scaling. Make it all the same
Rodgers RLE Forum: program scale scale coupling.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I wanna.
Rodgers RLE Forum: this is diagram area 4. So a couple traces and diagram 4. Trace 10 for me.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I don't know.
Rodgers RLE Forum: You can see the relative power wellness. You see, we only have marker one on here. We don't have markers on the other. 2 traces very easy way to cure that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and with the marker button at the very bottom. It says, comp couple markers. So click on couple markers.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now it gives us the values wherever we are. Another thing you can do as you're adding a lot of these diagram areas, and they get kind of small.
Rodgers RLE Forum: we can just expand and focus on a particular one at a time. So I have any of the traces in here highlighted, and then up at the top. Here there's kind of like a 4 way cross symbol, a little hard to see it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And so now we've made it full size, so we can see the different values. I can move
Rodgers RLE Forum: the markers around and see
Rodgers RLE Forum: what's going on with the harmonics at different frequencies.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And then when I'm done with that, you just click that button again and it collapses it back down.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I think that's enough for today.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Any questions to 4.3. Gigahertz. Yeah. But the blue and the red face are taking a measurement at twice, 3 times. Yeah. So the whatever that second harmonic one is actually the receiver is being tuned, one gig
Rodgers RLE Forum: to 8.6 gig, and so forth the 3.rd Yeah, but it uses the same scaling on the axis, the horizontal axis, which is helpful.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Can we possibly do a custom measurement where this this is not like multiple of the, I guess the frequency. You're exciting it. But maybe you add something
Rodgers RLE Forum: random accustomed offset absolutely, and one of the nice things since you brought it up, probably going to be one of the guys wanting to get, you know, into the nits of this. Let me just show you here. So I'm going to click on mold. So some of this functionality it's kind of hidden in the background. So I've got a trick channel config port config
Rodgers RLE Forum: board settings.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay? So
Rodgers RLE Forum: you can see right now for a particular
Rodgers RLE Forum: setting. Now.
Rodgers RLE Forum: it's showing we're on the our frequency tab up here
Rodgers RLE Forum: versus like the our power. So our frequency. It says, Fd, that's the base suite that we've we've put into the box, you know. Start frequency of 4.3. Stop it whatever.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay? And that's showing right here in the frequency. Result, 500 mega, 4.3 gig.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But here for frequency conversion, there's a dot dot dot.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So for any of these channels we can just click on here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and the way you change it right now, the frequency result. It's Fb, so whatever that front screen is telling you is what you're going to get.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But let's say we wanted to just park our receiver at a particular frequency.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I would click at 0 here
Rodgers RLE Forum: and frequency offset. Maybe I want to make it sit at 10 gigahertz.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So now
Rodgers RLE Forum: you see, the frequency result, 10 gigahertz set receiver. Just gonna sit 10. If you had an up or down converter you could similarly change it. Maybe we still have the Fb range. If it's up converter with a 7 gig
Rodgers RLE Forum: local oscillator, or something in 7 gig. Click. Okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And now
Rodgers RLE Forum: the output of the receiver is going to be sweeping 7.5 gig to 11.3. So very handy to do that with the receivers, you can also do that with the sources under the arbitrary power that's actually power. But I think for the arbitrary frequency. Let's say you wanted to use the
Rodgers RLE Forum: one of these ports port 4 as a Cw. Generator.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So
Rodgers RLE Forum: one of the things that happens normally with S. Parameters. By definition only one port can be driven at a time, while the other ports are. The receivers are all active. Okay? So we want to override that because we want to use a different port as a Cw source.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So I'll check Port 4 here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I want him to be
Rodgers RLE Forum: a source generator. I want him to be on all the time. He is on all the time now, and maybe my frequency, you know, put him at 5 gig or something.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so I'm doing a Cw. Tower to 5 gig
Rodgers RLE Forum: now it's on all the time.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and then, when I do a 5
Rodgers RLE Forum: and okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: now, Port 4,
Rodgers RLE Forum: cover yourself. Of course.
Rodgers RLE Forum: it's only gonna be active while the channel that I've currently selected is active. This is tied to the Channel.
Rodgers RLE Forum: If I want Port 4 to be active for all 3 channels, I'd have to go into all 3 channels and do what I just did there
Rodgers RLE Forum: make sense. The other thing you might notice, too, is up in
Rodgers RLE Forum: in the front here we've got different colored lights.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay?
Rodgers RLE Forum: So you can see the port one the blue occasionally turns on the
Rodgers RLE Forum: orange one. At least it's orange in real life
Rodgers RLE Forum: it's pretty much always on these are telling you what's going on behind the scene. The orange or yellow light is telling you that the generator is active. The blue light turns on when the receiver is active.
Rodgers RLE Forum: so it kind of gives you some good feedback that you're getting what you expect after we turn down that port floor. You see, the generator light turns on. So it's active.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So any other questions
Rodgers RLE Forum: channel and the ask parameter channel are like, of course, different times. So I guess in one cycle like the ask is another first, st and then our sleep, and then sort of like auto aligned.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Yeah. And you can see that it'll sweep one channel, then it sweeps another channel, and then the 3rd channel. It just continues around that way.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and by remote control. If you wanted to do that, you can actually say, Okay, I only want to be channel one. Leave the other ones active. But just give me one. Right now.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'll just quick question. Do you know, is it possible to put an external frequency reference on this guy? Absolutely. And do you know the phase noise? Typically of the local oscillator?
Rodgers RLE Forum: They're not terribly good by default, because Vna is classically designed to run. Give you really fast sweeps. So that's a engineering trade off. They tend to make. The other thing, too, is, you're generally poorly, at least for spirants using the same lo for the source and the receivers, so that phase, noise, kind of cancels out.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But yeah, it's a good point. You could actually, if you had a good signal source you wanted to use, you can connect it to the back, and there are drivers in here that will talk to it, and you can control it from the instrument and make it do sleeves, or whatever. If if that comes up, let me know, and I can
Rodgers RLE Forum: walk you through. So is it generally analyze it. If I'm just interested in some looking at. Yeah, yeah. So we we also have that capability over here
Rodgers RLE Forum: and under measurements.
Rodgers RLE Forum: and here shows everything. So there's on the bottom. There's the spectrum button oops the spectrum, and we can do spectrum analysis.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's dot dot dot, because it brings up these dialogues. So right now, you're gonna be measuring power. Core. 2
Rodgers RLE Forum: kind of thing. You can set the start, stop frequency range all this sort of stuff.
Rodgers RLE Forum: apply it.
Rodgers RLE Forum: hey?
Rodgers RLE Forum: So you know, it's acting like spectrum analyzer. Of course, for this case we probably would want to maybe set a source
Rodgers RLE Forum: 2, 6, 7,
Rodgers RLE Forum: if we are looking. Yeah. Port 2. So what's coming in port 2.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Let's set a single frequency. So
Rodgers RLE Forum: just like I just showed you channel config port config port settings.
Rodgers RLE Forum: one.
Rodgers RLE Forum: of course, generator on port, one beyond. And let's put it at 20.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Something interesting
Rodgers RLE Forum: oops
Rodgers RLE Forum: 0. This is one good.
Rodgers RLE Forum: hey? Fine.
Rodgers RLE Forum: hey?
Rodgers RLE Forum: And there's the you can see the hit and the harmonics as well. And some of those harmonics are probably coming out of my DUT.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Reduce the power here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: 30.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's this.
Rodgers RLE Forum: yeah, it looks very simple.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So yeah, a lot of flexibility.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Pretty much anything you in this day and age. You can do so much with these boxes.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's probably in here, maybe hidden, you know, somewhere, but it's in here, and if if you have a need reach out to me, or Steve has my contact info, and we can get you squared away.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Okay.
Rodgers RLE Forum: what's the what's the minimum bandwidth? If I use this anymore?
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, for this, well, it's an fft based. Analyzer, you can. Yeah, you can. Still, right now it's 1 kilohertz, but you can go down to like one Hertz. These are just like dedicated steps.
Rodgers RLE Forum: but you can manually go in, and
Rodgers RLE Forum: you can just pick a value, or if I go down there.
Rodgers RLE Forum: timbers here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: go, I think, up and down arrows will let you see all the possibilities. So I go down another one now it's showing 7 hertz.
Rodgers RLE Forum: 5 hertz, 3 hertz kind of thing. It'll go down to one Hertz. I know it does that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: but you're gonna take it on sweet time, but you'll see that the noise floor go down, too, and we can go up as well. If I go one kilohertz, or 10 kilohertz, you can see that the noise floor came up. Go to 100 kilohertz.
Rodgers RLE Forum: 30,
Rodgers RLE Forum: 50, 7,000 kilometers
Rodgers RLE Forum: sweeping there.
Rodgers RLE Forum: So if you're using this as a spec, and is it like sweeping the receiver like conventional spec? And or is it just like a single capture. No, it's actually sweeping. It's doing like a partial.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It doesn't fft because the bandwidth behind the scenes is only about 50 megahertz. So it's kind of taking 50 Megahertz grabs and splicing them together. So there is sweeping. That goes on. But it's
Rodgers RLE Forum: in ff team. No signal processing.
Rodgers RLE Forum: The yes, yeah. Yeah. There's an analog bandwidth limited to 50. You can play around with this. It's hard to see here, but there's I have filter. It says digital normal. So you can play games here, you can go to a high selectivity type filter. The other thing above it. It's grayed out, says I have filter analog. There are ways you can change that bandwidth, too, for your capture range.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But, unlike a regular or real spectrum analyzer, you know, real spectrum analyzer.
Rodgers RLE Forum: It's supposed to sweep like a quasi analog sweep, to capture any normal power in the range that you set, you know. Find me any power in there and report it, and only the power that's there not spurs from inside your your receiver or stuff like that?
Rodgers RLE Forum: one of those types of spurs is just image the image frequency L minus rf, and on the other side. So this is actually doing some other stuff behind the scenes to eliminate the image response, because these are very simple receivers. They're just mixers. So as it's sweeping along
Rodgers RLE Forum: actually behind the scenes, showing a signal here and showing the second signal on the other side of the yellow, and then it does some internal stuff to cancel that. So it looks like a real.
Rodgers RLE Forum: There's not a tracking pre selector the way that, like the full spectrum, not a tracking pre selectors and tracking pre selectors generally only operate up in the microwave range. It used to be that started about 3 gigahertz on the previous generations. We're up to like 8 gigahertz now, above 8. You have a tracking gig filter
Rodgers RLE Forum: to eliminate the images below that they just use the first.st mix as you come in with your signal, they mix it to a very hot with a very high lo to get it way up in frequency. So it's very easy to filter out the unwanted image from the real signal. And then second conversion stage brings that back down so, but above, like 8 gigahertz.
Rodgers RLE Forum: the effort and cost to get up to a high enough frequency. You know, the components in there get very expensive so it doesn't make sense to do it. Still, work fine. We take a little bit of a hit in amplitude, accuracy, and speed, but
Rodgers RLE Forum: and it's been used for 50 years. So it's a solid technology
Rodgers RLE Forum: sliding on with another question like, if we're interested in lower frequency and maybe like.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And so first, st I guess, is there an option to mix it down externally, or something like that? What you have to do? And I'm actually working on that in my lab. The generator will go down to 100 kilohertz on here.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But we would. We're stuck with these directional couplers which are designed for millimeter wave type work. You know that to get such a wide coverage range something's got to give and what it is is the low end. These couplers, their coupling. Sensitivity really rules off below about 500 megahertz.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And so we we claim, you know. Okay, it'll operate down to 10 Megahertz. And and it does but to go lower than that, you would have to come up with your own test set, which means just your own directional couplers that go lower in frequency, and then you would use these
Rodgers RLE Forum: undo these looping plugs, and from your directional coupler you would go directly into the measurement receiver and the reference receiver kind of thing. But
Rodgers RLE Forum: yeah, it works. It's a fine solution.
Rodgers RLE Forum: And you, oh, yeah.
Rodgers RLE Forum: well, yeah, that's a problem. One thing that is kind of nice. So maybe simplifies a little bit. We have direct if inputs on the back for all our receivers. So you don't even have to go through the the receive mixers inside. They directly go into A to D converters. And so you can use that. So
Rodgers RLE Forum: yeah, you might have to do some switching between. You know your network depending on what frequency range you want.
Rodgers RLE Forum: But it it kind of simplifies things. You're not having to disconnect and reconnect, just to go from one up to one Meg, and then one to 20 gig, or something like that.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Not even my question.
Rodgers RLE Forum: No.
Rodgers RLE Forum: hope not.
Rodgers RLE Forum: I'm good.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Let me see, let's see.
Rodgers RLE Forum: there we go, all right. So let's just give Greg.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Thank you for this.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Well, thank you. Yeah, thanks for your attention. Good questions,
Rodgers RLE Forum: and we're gonna be doing more of these. So like that with these particular applications or things you're interested in seeing. And we can focus on.
Rodgers RLE Forum: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.