HI All
Need some quick and dirty test equipment recommendations for determining my antenna(s) power. Can solder ( actually, that is my favorite programming language! ), can read schematics. Don't have cash for spectrum or HP.
: Need some quick and dirty test equipment recommendations for determining : my antenna(s) power. Can solder ( actually, that is my favorite : programming language! ), can read schematics. Don't have cash for : spectrum or HP.
Is this quick or dirty enough?
Once you learn which end of the soldering iron to grab, the rest is easy.
HP141 series mainframes and plugins can be had fairly cheap. However, the 10GHz plug in is not cheap if working. I've seen quite a few "repairable" spectrum analyzers for sale, that offer a substantial savings if you have some repair abilties, manuals, parts, and time. You can sorta cheat (like me) by using the 1.2GHz plugin and using a butchered, er... modified MMDS downconverter to look at 2.4GHz. One catch. The inband response is anything but flat making calibration at best a bad guess.
A really cheezy way of getting a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer is to use a frequency hopping card. These have 80 channels, each 1MHz wide, that can be scanned. The popular card is the Proxim Rangelan2 7400 card. The drivers from the Proxim site include replacment firmware and a DOS based spectrum analyzer application. It's fairly crude but good enough for crude relative level and spectra tests. A few catches. The sensitivity sucks due to lack of spread spectrum processin gain, and it doesn't work with XP.
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