First modular experimental system worldwide

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We could present our bricks to a number of radio amateurs at this year’s SHF meeting in Rosenfeld, Germany where we also gave a speech on our latest innovations regarding everything around SHF. We showed the audience how our bricks could be used in the 75 Ghz (W band) frequency range that is used, for example, in the automobile industry for measuring distance with a radar.

For this, we used a harmonic mixer that is based on a flip chip diode and that uses a SHF at 25.2 GHz multiplied by three and generated by a brick. The result will be subtracted by the frequency to be measured. In our example, it is a Gunoscillator that you can set between 75 GHz and 76.2 GHz. A LNA will direct the result to our frequency measurement brick (up to 2.5 GHz). Via your PC, you can set up the harmonic mixer frequency via a USB and the display will directly show the 75 GHz as a measurement result. At the same time, we led the signal to the spectrum analyzer brick and thus made the modulated signal visible.

This is the first modular experimental system for this frequency range worldwide!

In a second experiment involving our new heterodyne signal generator, we managed to generate an oscillation of 10 GHz that mixes its output signal with an external multiplier brick (8x) up to 10 GHz. Via a SMA adapter, the signal gets to a waveguide attenuator (printed out of PLA in 3D and laminated with copper foil). You can adjust the attenuation from 0 to 30 dB via a valve. The LOG power meter brick (AD8317 with 1MHz up to 12 GHz ) directly shows the information in dBm via a bar display.

SHF: Range 3-30 GHz; EHF: Range 30 GHz-300 GHz

Rolf-Dieter Klein