Hi, my name is Scott, and I am an engineer here at Agilent.
Today I am going to be demonstrating the M1970 harmonic waveguide mixer.
Now, this mixer is faster to set up and much easier to use than the legacy mixers.
For the setup, we have the PSG signal generator that is outputting a signal at 60 GHz.
We also have the PXA signal analyzer with an external mixing option.
Finally, we have the smart harmonic mixer.
There are going to be two demos that I will perform for you today.
The first one will show you how easy it is to set up the system.
The second, will show you how the power in the LO will automatically adjust to compensate
for loss in the LO cable.
The first step in connecting the mixer is to plug in the LO cable into the IF and LO
input on the mixer.
Next, simply plug in the USB cable on the signal analyzer.
Now, the signal analyzer will automatically detect the center frequency and the span of
the mixer, and it will still start aligning the LO.
Now, what it is doing is it is compensating for any loss in this IF and LO cable and making
sure that the power level is adjusted to be consistent across the entire frequency span
relative to the waveguide entrance.
Now, when it is finished aligning, the mixer is all ready to make measurements, and that
is how easy it is to set up and use.
Next, I am going to show that the smart harmonic mixer is more accurate than legacy mixers.
First, I am going to turn on a 60 GHz continuous signal, and what you will see on the PXA signal
analyzer is the 60 GHz signal along with the mixing products.
The reason for this is that the smart harmonic mixer is not preselected.
Now, we do have a function that will get rid of these mixing products, and that is called
“signal I.D.”
We simply turn on the signal I.D. function, and all we can see now is the signal that
is coming from the PSG.
Next, I am going to center on 60 GHz and add a delta marker.
Now, what I wanna show you is how the power level of the LO is automatically compensated
for any loss in that LO cable and in the path to the waveguide entrance.
To do this, I am going to take a three dB attenuator and stick it in the path of the
LO.
One advantage of the smart harmonic mixer over the legacy mixers is that it has much
better conversion loss failures.
As a result, the smart harmonic mixer has better accuracy and sensitivity than the legacy
mixers.
Now, before I can account for the power loss, I have to realign the external mixer.
To do this, I simply go to our alignments, and I just hit “external mixer”, and now
we wait for the mixer to align.
Now, that the LO has finished aligning, we still have one more step.
We have to account for the loss in the IF path.
Now, the reason why we do this is we are using a single cable for both the LO and the IF
signals.
We do have a way to do this, and we have to enter it manually.
We go into “external mixing” to “cable IF loss”.
We enter the extra 3 dB of attenuation that we put in.
As you can see, the level of the power at that point is now back to the place it was
when we started.
Therefore, the smart harmonic mixer was able to automatically compensate for the loss in
the LO cable due to that 3 dB attenuator.
Today, I have shown you how easy and fast it is to set up and use the smart harmonic
mixer.
I have also shown you how accurate it is compared to the legacy mixers due to better conversion
loss values and the auto-power correction for the LO.
You can access more information about the smart harmonic mixer from the URL: www.agilent.com/find/smartmixers
Thank you for watching today’s video.