Friday, March 7, 2008

Signal Generator

I met with Meng-Hung this morning, and we spoke about the equipment and how we might construct a signal similar to the HDTV signal. He mentioned that it's not essential to deliver HDTV data modulated signal through our system, that we could simply use a 2.4GHz signal without the modulated data.

He emphasized that we concentrate on our Bulter matrix design, so that we can begin to fabricate soon. Grbic also stressed this point, so I've sent an email message to the team saying that I'm willing to help with that aspect of our project for the next week, in preparation for our review this coming Thursday.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Manuals for Equiptment in Lab

This entry will mainly deal with how to construct a modulated signal in the lab, so that we can test the quality of our realized design. Although we have not completed our design, let alone the fabrication, we need to know if it is possible to modulate a signal in the lab. The team also scheduled a project review with professor next Thursday from 6:30-7pm (subject to change). In the review, Grbic will tell us if we are making progress to complete the project adequately, or if we need to pick up the pace.

Meng Hung sent an email with the signal generating equipment available to us in the lab. He mentioned three pieces, namely HP E4433B ESG-D Series Signal Generator, HP 8350A Sweep Oscillator, and HP D4000A Digital Signal Generator. I promptly located the manuals found on the Agilent website, which I can provide to you if you request a specific manual. On each of the three manuals, I searched for the pertinent information to phase modulation, and suggest reading a few times to familiarize with the modulation controls before actually testing our antenna array. The following page numbers correspond to the pages on the pdf files I have.

8350A p.72-3
E4433B p.124-136
D4000A p.55-7, 532-551 (similar to E4433B phase modulation)

I would like to schedule an appointment with Meng Hung, to actually attempt to construct a phase modulated signal at our frequency of operation. If the equipment does not support the frequency we're interested in transmitting, we may need to change the signal characteristics.