• You can now help support WorldwideDX when you shop on Amazon at no additional cost to you! Simply follow this Shop on Amazon link first and a portion of any purchase is sent to WorldwideDX to help with site costs.
  • A Winner has been selected for the 2025 Radioddity Cyber Monday giveaway! Click Here to see who won!

testing for filter response?

Moleculo

Ham Radio Nerd
Apr 14, 2002
9,317
1,998
283
Is there a way you can use a signal generator and an O-Scope to figure out an unknown filter bandwidth and shape in a radio? If so, what's the procedure?
 

Assuming you have a calibrated generator, and an o'scope which has a perfectly flat response within its specififed bandwidth (or a chart/formula to show/calculate the amount of response change with frequency), all you need to do is inject equal-amplitude signals at regular frequency intervals and meaure the input vs output of the filter, and record your data. You will then be able to build a graph of the filter response. Better yet, use one of those circuit simulator packages such as Circuitmaker or Electronics Workbench. Electronics Workbench even has a filter design wizard which really speeds up design.
 
yes, just plot P-P voltage vs frequency.

you could also use a detector to get a DC voltage on the scope, then if your scope is a storage scope, and your sweep generator has a volts/freq sweep output (or sweep ramp output), you could use X-Y mode and get the plot right on the scope, then if your scope is PC interfaceable, like with GPIB/parallel, or has print screen, there you go....

For example, most of my sources output a sweep voltage that corresponds to the start frequency of 0V and stop frequency of 10V. It is a ramp voltage that tracks my sweep.

Or, if you have a fancy analyzer with a sweep generator, you could just drive the filter with the generator output...

Or just whip out your vector network analyzer :P

MTE_Anritsu_Vector.jpg
 
Oh yea, you probably don't have an extra $50K laying around for one of those...In that case, you can, all by yourself, build an N2PK vector network analyzer to measure filter response...amongst a but load of other neato stuff...

Build you one today, build you an N2PK

www.n2pk.com

:naughty :twsted :wow :wav :guitar :welcome :pint :beer :moon :naughty

You gonna like it!
 
Actually what's kinda funny is that I found that I have a book ("The Complete RF Technician's Handbook") that I just found tells you how to do exactly what I was asking about. I don't have time to post what it says right now, but I'll try to do it tomorrow.
 

dxChat
Help Users
  • No one is chatting at the moment.