Fix Receiver Saturation:The Conversion Loss and Mixer Dynamic Range Trade-off Secret
Designing a receiver isn’t easy. You worry a strong interfering signal will saturate your downconverter. The result is a distorted signal, making your whole system useless. The best way to balance performance is to relax the downconverter’s conversion loss to 8-12 dB1. This allows for a higher IP3, giving you a much wider dynamic range2. Also, add a filter before the mixer to suppress interference and image frequencies, which can improve dynamic range by over 15 dB. It feels wrong to accept more loss in a system. I get it. But as RF engineers, we know that performance is a game of trade-offs. Sometimes, a small, strategic sacrifice in one […]
How Do You Troubleshoot Satellite Upconverter RF Noise Floor Calibration Errors?
Getting impossible noise floor readings can stop your project cold. You know the numbers are wrong, but you can’t find the source of the error, wasting valuable time. Your first step is to check the software, not the hardware. An impossibly low noise floor reading, below -174 dBm/Hz1, is almost always a software calibration error. Confirm this by using a 50-ohm load, then recalibrate the ADC power mapping. I’ve seen this issue trip up even experienced engineers. It feels like a hardware problem, so we start tearing down the test setup. But the real problem often lies hidden in the code. Let’s walk through how to find it and fix […]
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