RF Test Equipment – Experimental Engineering

Posted on February 20, 2023March 25, 2023 by The Engineer — Leave a comment

Vectawave VBA1000-18

Here’s something that in my primary job as an EMC Test Engineer gets a lot of use – a laboratory grade amplifier for performing the Immunity testing phase of an EMC suite. I figured it was about time to crack them open & have a look at what makes them tick. I’ll start with the 100kHz-1GHz model in this post.

The main PSU providing power to the amplifier & control components is a 150W Meanwell unit in this example. While Meanwell have some fairly decent supplies, they are overall very hit & miss on reliability & especially in the compliance domain – the RSP-1000 & RSP2400 versions claim to be EMC Class B Conducted compliant, and definitely are not! They also claim Radiated Immunity to Industrial levels, but I’ve seen them fail this test, by reducing their output voltage by a factor of 10!

A 120mm 12V fan on the rear panel draws cooling air over the internal components. These amplifiers are Class A, so they do generate quite some heat due to the inefficiencies of this operational mode.

All the wideband RF magic is contained in this module. What’s unusual about these lab amps is the number of decades of operation – RF amplifiers are usually rather narrowband, and it’s very difficult to construct a wideband amplifier that has even close to a flat frequency response. There aren’t many connections; just the RF I/O connectors on SMAs, a ground, main power supply & finally an Enable input.

There’s a small PCB inside to do the safety interlocks, which are BNC connections on the back, as well as temperature monitoring & overtemperature shutdown. This just has a small PIC microcontroller & a few passives.

After taking the top off the amplifier module, a small PCB is all that’s in there, with single-sided construction. By the look the rear copper layer is all ground plane. Power supply & enable inputs are dealt with at the top of the board, with the pre-amp stage at bottom right, and finally the main PA stage bottom centre. This appears to be a push-pull design, with dual MOSFETs at all RF stages, and splitters/combiners at the I/O respectively.

Posted on September 12, 2021May 8, 2022 by The Engineer — Leave a comment

HP 5087-7048 Directional Coupler Teardown

Time for some more RF component teardowns, here’s a very high quality Directional Coupler from HP, I believe this was part of a Vector Network Analyser at some stage. The main body appears to be made of Brass, but the entire unit looks like it’s Gold plated – the shine is far too good to be just Brass! Connections are via SMA connectors.

There isn’t much on the label to explain what the specifications are unfortunately. Nothing that can’t be found out with a quick look on a VNA though.

After removing the 6 Torx screws securing the top cap of the coupler, the internal components are revealed. There is no RF gasket or seal on the top cover, and relies on flat machining for an RF seal.

The internal construction of this unit is a little different from what I’ve seen before in directional couplers. The arrangement is usually parallel copper tracks on a suitable RF substrate, but in this case, HP have used a very small diameter Coaxial cable, covered with ferrite sleeves on the outer shield. The large square block in the middle is rubber, and may just be to stabilise the assembly. It may also be loaded with ferrite powder to give some RF properties too.
The ferrite cores are secured in place with beads of black silicone, again probably to prevent movement under vibration.

The input of this coupler is AC coupled via a capacitor, and then fed into the centre core of the Coax. The forward power output pin, visible at the top of the track, is coupled to the centre core of the coax by a tiny carbon track making up a resistor, via another ceramic capacitor. The track is more directly coupled via another carbon trace to the outer shield of the Coax. I believe this coupler is damaged, as the carbon trace that goes via the capacitor has a break in the centre, but the coupler does seemingly still work.

The other end of the coupler is very similar, although with no main line coupling capacitor, it’s direct fed to the SMA here. The reverse power output is connected the same way as the other, with a network. The carbon trace here though doesn’t have a break.

Posted on September 4, 2020August 21, 2020 by The Engineer — Leave a comment

Test Equipment Upcycling – Variable Attenuator Module

A while back I found myself in the need of an adjustable RF attenuator capable of high-GHz operation. As luck would have it I had an old Spectrum analyser on the shelf at work, which we had retired quite some time ago.

Spectrum analysers being quite capable test instruments, I knew that the input attenuation would be done with a standalone module that we could recover for reuse without too much trouble.

The attenuator module

Here’s the module itself, with the factory drive PCB removed from the bottom, showing the solenoids that operate the RF switches. There are test wires attached to them here to work out which solenoid switches which attenuation stage. In the case of this module, there are switches for the following:

Input select switch
AC/DC coupling
-5dB
-10dB
-20dB
-40dB

For me this means I have up to -75dB attenuation in 5dB steps, with optional switchable A-B input & either AC or DC coupling.

Drive is easy, requiring a pulse on the solenoid coil to switch over, the polarity depending on which way the switch is going.

Building a Control Board

Now I’ve identified that the module was reusable, it was time to spin up a board to integrate all the features we needed:

Onboard battery power
Pushbutton operation
Indication of current attenuation level

The partially populated board is shown at right, with an Arduino microcontroller for main control, 18650 battery socket on the right, and control buttons in the centre. The OLED display module for showing the current attenuation level & battery voltage level is missing at the moment, but it’s clear where this goes.

As there weren’t enough GPIO pins for everything on the Arduino, a Microchip MC23017 16-Bit I/O expander, which is controlled via an I²C bus. This is convenient since I’m already using I²C for the onboard display.

Driving the Solenoids

A closer view of the board shows the trip of dual H-Bridge drivers on the board, which will soon be hidden underneath the attenuator block. These are LB1836M parts from ON Semiconductor. Each chip drives a pair of solenoids.

Power Supplies

The bottom of the board has all the power control circuitry, which are modularised for ease of production. There’s a Lithium charge & protection module for the 18650 onboard cell, along with a boost converter to give the ~9v rail required to operate the attenuator solenoids. While they would switch at 5v, the results were not reliable.

Finishing off

A bit more time later, some suitable firmware has been written for the Arduino, and the attenuator block is fitted onto the PCB. The onboard OLED nicely shows the current attenuation level, battery level & which input is selected.

Posted on August 17, 2020 by The Engineer — Leave a comment

DIY 75Ω Matching Pads

Recently I found the need to do some measurements on 75Ω CATV equipment, only having 50Ω test equipment to use. For this, matching networks exist to convert 50Ω to 75Ω, but they’re fairly simple, so building them was a viable option.

Above is the very simple schematic to create the 75Ω match. To help keep any parasitics down, this circuit will be built directly onto the back of BNC connectors, that are soldered back-to-back, before being covered in shielding tape.

Here’s the first 50Ω BNC connector, with the resistor network soldered on. I’ve used 4x 360Ω resistors in parallel to create the 90Ω to ground, and a single 43Ω series resistor on the centre pin.

This end view of the arrangement shows the 4 resistors evenly spaced around the centre pin & soldered to the shell.

The centre pin of the 75Ω BNC connector is trimmed down to match the length needed to touch the end of the series resistor, and it’s soldered in place. It’s a bit tricky, soldering within the gap between 2 of the ground pins!

Finally, the internals are shielded with copper tape, soldered at the seams.

Posted on July 4, 2020 by The Engineer — 3 Comments

NanoVNA-Qt Raspberry Pi AppImage Build

There’s quite a nice desktop app for the new NanoVNA v2, NanoVNA-Qt. It’s released as an AppImage for Linux, but unfortunately there is no version to run on a Pi supplied. The version below is built to run on the latest version of Raspbian (as of writing this, 2020-05-27).

NanoVNA-Qt Raspberry Pi AppImage

1 file(s) 26.85 MB

Download

Enjoy!

Posted on July 1, 2020June 29, 2020 by The Engineer — Leave a comment

HP 8753C Display LCD Replacement

Since I inherited an old HP 8753C Network Analyser from work, I figured updating a few things to relatively modern standards would be good. The factory CRT, being 28 years old, is definitely getting a little tired, not to mention being slow to warm up. I read over on the EEVBlog forums about a DIY modification to integrate an LCD display into place instead. There was also the option of a ready-made kit for these instruments which would integrate an LCD, but the cost at over £300 was very prohibitive!

The CRT display unit is a self-contained Sony unit, taking RGBHV signalling from the graphics control card of the analyser. Power is 65v DC which will definitely come in handy for powering the new LCD & control gear, after some conversion.

Doing a quick test with some wiring stuck into the video connector from the graphics controller, proved that I could get a decent video signal out of the unit! The only signals used here are RGB, along with the vertical & horizontal sync.

The video is converted to VGA by way of a GBS-8200 arcade machine video conversion board, which will take many different video formats & spit out standard VGA signalling. The power supply to the left is a standard 100-240v to 12v PSU, which is happy to run at 6t5v DC input voltage, albeit with a ~5 second delay on output startup when power is applied. This is due to the massive 6.6MΩ resistance of the startup resistor chain, which I did reduce by 50% to 3.3MΩ with no effect. Since it does start OK even with the delay, I think I’ll not tinker with it any further. I doubt I could pull the full rated power from it with such a low input voltage, but all included, this mod draws less than 600mA at 12v.
A custom 20-pin IDC cable was made up to connect to the analyser’s graphics board, and this was then broken out into the required RGB & sync signals. Quite a few of the grounds are unused, I’ve not yet noticed any issues with EMC or instability.

There is a quad-XOR gate deadbugged to the PCB, which is taking the separate sync signals & combining them into a composite sync. The conversion board does have separate sync inputs, but for some reason doesn’t sync when they’re applied separately. This gate IC is powered from the 3.3v rail of the converter board, with the power lines tacked across one of the decoupling caps for the DRAM IC.

The donor 8.4″ LCD came from eBay in the form of a POS auxiliary display. I pulled the panel from the plastic casing, along with the control boards, and attached them all to the back. This LCD also had a sheet of toughened glass attached to the front, no doubt to protect against the Great Unwashed while in use! This was also removed.

A cut piece of plexiglas allows the boards to be mounted in the cavernous space the CRT once occupied, with some brass standoffs. 12v power & VGA are routed down to the LCD on the front of the analyser.

The LCD itself is tacked in place with cyanoacrylate glue to the securing clips for the glass front panel, which is more than enough to hold things in place. The input board which just has the VGA connector & power connector is glued edge-on to the metal back panel of the LCD, and is under little strain so this joint should survive OK.

Posted on June 5, 2020 by The Engineer — Leave a comment

HP 85046A 3GHz S-Parameter Test Set Teardown

This enormous box is the S-Parameter Test Set from a HP 8753C 3GHz network analyser. This unit contains the required components to automate the testing process for items such as cables, antennas & RF networks.

The main EUT test ports are APC-7mm type connectors – a very expensive genderless RF connector that provides very repeatable coaxial connections.

The interconnects for the RF input, Reference output back to the analyser, A&B ports are N-Type, and should be connected to the main unit with phase-matched cables.

On removing the lid, it’s almost a completely empty box! All the RF magic is done in the first 150mm behind the front pane, apart from a coil of semi-rigid coax on the right, which will be to match the lengths of cables in the unit for phase purposes. There’s not much visible on the top here, just the control board, which takes signalling from the main analyser unit, and only has some glue logic & comparators. There’s a very nice 3-port solid-state RF switch in the centre, for switching between S12 & S21 measurements rapidly, a function that would not be possible with a mechanical relay. All the internal connections are made with semi-rigid coaxial cable, fitted with SMA connectors.

The back of the case just has the 25-way D connector for control, and a pair of BNC connections & 500mA fuses for DC biasing the output ports where required by the EUT.

Underneath the centre panel is where most of the RF magic happens. These two blocks, which are integrated with the test ports contain bias tees for each port, a power splitter for the RF reference back to the analyser & directional couplers for reading back the forward & reverse RF power from each test port.

The final component in here is a 70dB step attenuator, adjustable in 10dB steps.