Testing Night

I plan to bring the following test equipment along.
• A Signal Hound SB44B spectrum analyzer which covers 1Hz to
4.4GHz complete with TG44A signal tracking generator.
• A Signal Hound VSG25A vector signal generator.
• Directional couplers good to 3GHz.
• Peak reading Bird Thruline power meter with assorted slugs.
• Fluke Multimeter.
• Agilent LCR meter.
• Dummy loads.
• Lots of adaptors and test cables.

What sort of things can be measured?
• Signal quality; intermod products and harmonic output.
• Phase noise but only if the equipment is very poor.
• Losses in coax-cable and connectors.
• Filter band pass and insertion loss.
• Power output and how it effects signal quality.
• Return Loss (S11) against frequency of antennas and filters etc.
• Insertion loss and isolation of coaxial relays.
• Small signal gain of pre and power amps against frequency.

What sort of thing cannot be measured?
• At my shack I can measure noise figure but the equipment does
not travel well so best done there.
• Very accurate frequency as I will not be able to get a GPS signal in
the Scout hut so the spectrum analyzer will be running on its
internal 10MHz reference signal.
• Phase noise < -100dBc/Hz, work in progress on this challenge.
• No vector network analyzer so no phase data.
• Difficult to measure Rx performance in the time available.