EEVblog #261 - Marconi 2023 RF Signal Generator Teardown

hi it's tear down time again today we got a real sexy bit of Kit this is a Marone instruments 2023 1.2 GHz signal generator oh I love it this one's going to be fun lots of porn in here let's check it out and you should know the name Marone yes the famous man himself and that led to a whole bunch of companies uh including a spin-off Marone instruments and interestingly I used to work back in the day at GC Marone go figure anyway uh they um used to make some really topend highly reputable um RF uh signal sources generators all sorts of test gear like that so very famous names I expect a whole bunch of topend very well-designed Hardware in here made in England Beauty the Old Dart Ripper and uh they were sold sadly to um IFR systems I think back in the late '90s or thereabouts and in the early 2000 sold to a company called aeroflex huh go figure and apparently they still sell this you can still buy the 2023a looks exactly the same it's probably got a few little upgrades inside but you can still buy the same instrument today more than I don't know at least 15 years later fantastic think we're going to enjoy this one let's check it out oh yeah you can smell it m Top End Hardware and I thought I'd just show you it uh powered on first because look at this beautiful uh back lit dot matrix display I'm not sure how well it's going to show up on video but it's really bright really fantastic display almost like a vacuum fluorescent uh display keypad interface external modulation input over here 9 khz to 1 2 gig uh frequency range all up and it's got uh the low frequency modulation output and the RF output of course which is an end connector but I've got an end to BNC uh on there and of course it's got to have a knob beautiful and check this out if we hit the carrier frequency button here we can actually adjust this thing in 1 Hertz steps from 9 khz all the way up to 1.2 GHz 1 Herz steps got to be kidding me so let's go up to a GHz there there it is 1 GHz and we can still go up in 1 Herz steps beautiful it's got two different types of modulation as well you can which you can actually uh mix together as well as with the external modulation input over here and it really is quite a versatile RF signal generator I love it and the RF output can go anywhere from + 13 dbm to minus 137 DB beautiful and with this puppy of course we can can check the bandwidth of our agilant infin vision 3000x series scope here 500 MHz bandwidth scope let's check it out I've got a 10 MHz uh signal I'm feeding in now at about half a volt um RMS so uh let's try and find the uh minus 3db uh frequency of this thing you'd expect it to be 500 MHz cuz that's its quoted bandwidth so expect it to drop to about 350 MTS or minus 3db 707 of 500 Vols at 500 MHz let's give that a go let's up the frequency directly to 500 MHz there it is and check it out it's only 400 odd molt so it actually does better than that so we're going to have to um up the frequency here and uh see what happens so I'm going to uh up it in 1 MHz steps until 450 or 453 or thereabouts there it is and that's 637 mahz beautiful and just as a little heads up adelin going to actually upgrade this scope for me to the one the brand new 1 GHz um option so it's going back to Melbourne I'm going to be flying down there in the coming months and we'll see hopefully see this puppy being upgraded to 1 GHz so stay tuned for that one all right I know you're curious to see it let's wind the wick up even further let's go can it display our 1 GHz signal it certainly can can it go to 1.2 oh yeah but now we're really right down in the noise but interestingly the hardware frequency counter is still spot on and on the back here we've got uh there's a sticker that says no options fitted bummer so this thing comes with uh various options uh one of the real good ones is the um really uh High stability ility temperature oven uh controlled uh oscillator so I don't have that what a bummer but doesn't matter I've got those in my lab anyway and check it out made in England how often do you see that the Old Dart brilliant and of course it can be controlled by the rs232 or i e and it's got a standard I Mains input connector it's got various other uh DC inputs and a um RF uh output on the back optional which I haven't got or DC Supply if you uh want to use it in some sort of remote location or something like that but that's about all you got on the back now it's time to crack this thing open and that came open uh pretty easily exactly as you'd expect instrument of this type too with the uh case just sliding off the back like that after a few screws and check out what's up here there's a loose bit of there's a bit of paper let's check it out I wonder what it is unbelievable it's uh maybe somebody's serviced it or done something what is it it's a data sheet different transistor what the why on Earth is that stuck inside this thing nothing on the back that's bizarre and as for the unit itself this is pretty much uh the construction I expected the power supply is huge it takes up almost the full uh length and the full height of the unit so that's massive I'm a bit surprised at the uh size of that power supply I guess they're going for ultra high reliability I guess uh one big uh digital processor uh board on the top it's got the main frequency Crystal here we'll take a look at and you know coax or two going around but all of the RF magic is contained in a can on the bottom there presumably exactly what I [Music] expected and let's take a look in the power supply section and it's not uh really as big as I thought but um here's the main board here and but they've also got the uh backlight inverter in here as well and they're basically just using it as a big shielded cage pretty much there's a bit of wasted uh space over here but apart from that that's pretty much what they're doing is just uh shielding this sucker but they've also gone to a lot of trouble on the finer points of the engineering in here so let's take a look at it now these power devices attached to the side of the case they're using the side of the case as a heat sink they gone to the trouble to do a custom folded aluminium bracket there massive amount and there's a second secondary uh metal uh black bracket behind here as well and uh they've used some very professional looking uh clamping mechanism full of devices all individually screwed they've got some uh seal pad material behind there very nice there's a couple of linear linear uh voltage Regulators on there plus a couple of switching uh components here and over here as well and they've just gone to a lot of trouble to actually uh heat SN those very professionally on the side of the case I like it and the Transformer here as you'd expect it's uh professionally uh mu metal uh wrap there just to try and uh keep the leakage from that down they got a another heat sink uh heat sink device over here and they've got um four uh output filter caps here because probably for redundancy and stuff like that they're not just relying on one big one they got either two or four uh separate ones or possibly sub due to the massive inductors in here probably some extra uh low frequency filtering as well and the main capacitors have been gunked down so they don't vibrate unfortunately this little uh vertical risen board here could actually uh vibrate a little bit but look they've gone to the effort to put the plastic spacers on a good lot of the high powerered resistors and diodes on this board I really like that no surprises though the power supply is actually made in Taiwan by a third party ah well you can't have everything but that's fairly typical of these devices but they've put a lot of effort into this Supply and here's the power switch on the front panel there and they've gone to quite a bit of effort to actually make this uh shielded and the shielding is connected down there properly crimped and properly uh locked in in place with a um Shaker prooof nut and uh it's really quite nice just to Shield the mains wiring going from the back to the front I really like that and they've got more grounding on the heat sink plate here which goes into here and also the Earth they've got that uh going down to the plate down the bottom once again um also with a uh Shake proof nut and professionally crimped and there's the other end of the Main's cable once again the shield for that is also connected at this end as well and check out the rubber boot they've got uh complet like a heat shrink uh rubber boot going over the I power connector brilliant and this device down here that looks for to me for all the world like one of those uh temperature uh cutout things so maybe if the temperature of this plate gets too high it's just going to cut out the Main's input beautiful I don't think I've ever seen that on a bit of t gear like this and one thing you'll note on the back of the case here they've got this uh metal uh stuck on metal braid like this to uh get good RF uh screening between uh this and the uh back and well and the uh top the outer cover of the unit nice attention to detail they're really serious about uh uh keeping things out keeping RF out of this and keeping it in and there's the LCD backlight uh switching board nothing really uh exciting going on there but uh they've put it inside this the same case as the switching power supply to keep to uh Shield it from the rest of the circuitry great and the power supply output wire in here they got a couple of ferite beads on there for RFI and those beads there are actually matched with these ones on the input to the board down there check it out and there's a nice uh standard flat Flex uh rainbow ribbon cable there go from the digital board uh to actually penetrate they use a D9 connector sorry a d25 connector here to penetrate uh down through into the RF uh section of the board another rainbow ribbon cable going to the front panel here for all the uh switches and there's another rainbow Cable in the back of this board which actually uh connects everything from one side this board over here once again through to the front panel board and construct of the main ball is fairly typical of the era we've got uh plcc packages here for various uh devices and uh the rest of them are just standard so packages so you know we're talking 95 96 vintage here they've got one dip 40 package up the top here but apart from that um it's you know they've used all SMD electrolytic uh caps all around here totally almost totally um SMD design I like it but they've got a socket at eom of course um still fairly typical of the day cuz they're using a micro uh processor instead of a micr controller which has flash firmware they've got good oldfashioned eom love it and of course there's the obligatory uh bdge wires around here green mod wires maybe to try and match in with the green solder mask on the PCB perhaps but they're uh near some hc's there's a lot of 74 um HC series uh TTL stuff on here and we've got an analog devices a DSP 2100 series uh microcontroller SL DSP it's optimized essentially a microcontroller optimized for DSP uh type work 25 mips or thereabouts nothing uh Earth shattering by by today's standards but that would have been a relatively uh Powerful Beast back in 1995 there it is 41st week 95 so that dates this board uh to uh very much towards the end of 95 possibly uh early 96 6 manufacturer and we've got a highq brand very popular uh for the age TCO 768 10 MHz reference oscillator now this is the uh temperature compensated oscillator it's not the um uh extra option uh oven stabilized uh oscillator you got to pay I don't know a th000 or a couple of grand more for that option and look at what we have here an Intel ADC 188 uh processor and we've got the eom to go along with it so they've clearly uh split the uh function processing functionality between the Intel processor and between the uh uh Analog Devices DSP we saw before we've got another uh atmail um eom device up here we' got some SRAM and uh this device over here is an NEC uh 7 uh 7210 uh gpib controller and that's about all she wrote for the uh processing part of this thing and this Texas Instruments tl1 16c 452 it's a Tronics uh printer port interface and duel uart as well so it's one of those um sort of you know all-in-one LSI solutions for uh centronics and seral back in the days of the IBM PC and here we've got an 87537 uh dual 12-bit deck and support circuitry with those caps up here and stuff like that and it's obviously part of the modulation uh capability because the external modulation inputs are up here like this and uh so obviously um that's part of um I'm not sure if it's all of the modulation capability but it's least the high level modulation capability of the board and we've got some power supply stuff around here and we've got an ad 586 that's a 5vt Precision uh reference right there and that's probably about all there is to the main control board and if you notice the front panel end connector down in there it doesn't have a shielded coax at all instead it's a proper metal tubing there might be a coax inside that metal tubing but they've really gone to town they're not just relying on the braid of the uh of the coax itself they're they're really making sure and using that as a full metal tube and that goes all runs all the way over to the other side here and here's just another view of that uh tube in going from the end connector on the front panel there all the way across down into the RF section and check out the RF section there's an awful lot of screws and stuff on this thing whoa this could take some effort uh-oh this module contains burum oxide components refer to handbook screw the handbook well it seems like I've uh taken off possibly the wrong side because there's a um this is all d cast um aluminium here and uh so all the screws on the bottom obviously hold in the board on that side all these Center screws they're all mold it looks like they're all molded into that diecast but there is this top aluminium plate with all these screws so maybe it's a jeel side uh access board this plate here um I expect if I take off all these uh screws we should get access to at least some circuitry under here with the bulk of it being accessible on the other side oh yeah smell it RF porn it just isn't aside here look at the uh this whole diecast plate here they've actually built in um the standoffs for the top PCB into that here and here so that you know that's lot of system engineering which goes in there to ensure that you know that this whole thing is assembled and constructed um you know so that the mechanical people who design this talk to the PCB people who are laying out the board talk to the system Engineers who are uh actually uh laying out um you know designing the architecture of the thing and oh it's just a lot of work but Tada here we have RF magic one of the first things you'll know notice is that all this circuitry is embedded in the diecast can here and it's surrounded by this um what looks like a um like a rubber um seal against the top plate but if we take a look at that so let's actually probe what that stuff which looks like rubber down there and it's not it's it's completely conductive and there's no surprises really this construction you've seen it before in my uh tear down of the uh tectronics um mixed domain Spectrum analyzer scope and it's very typical of um RF system design like this is very modular they're actually broken down into modules and you can physically see them and you can actually see the uh controlled impedance uh traces and check out the heavy number of bolts they've got tying down the board in each section it's absolutely incredible and if you look closely you can see the penetrators going through to the uh bottom module down in here so um these penetrators are all the way along they they're tapping points off they're either injecting stuff in or they're tapping stuff out down to the bottom uh RF section of this board I love it it's brilliant and what we've got here is clearly the output board because if you look down in there there's the uh that RF tubeing going into the end connector on the front panel and it goes into a Pickering um RF relay here that thing wouldn't be cheap let me tell you it might be 100 bucks or something like that wouldn't surprise me at all um so there's obviously some Power Protection uh circuitry in there which trips the relay or something like that now what I've done here is I've flipped the board around so that the output is over here to match the system block diagram and if we show the system block diagram on top of this it might actually uh make some sense here's the output um uh reverse polarity protection here um we've probably got the step attenuator here we've probably got the pulse modulator here coming through one of the penetrators there the input to the pulse modulator and the input to the uh step attenuator perhaps and then going along further we might have the uh bfo we might the two uh bfo uh switching sections with the input the bfo is actually probably on the bottom uh board down in there but they're just the switch sections for it and then over here we've probably got the level uh modu and probably the am modulation too so you can see how that's probably making sense now based on the block diagram and that's probably how they design this thing you start off with a high Lev block diagram you go into little building blocks and then you're going to lay out your board pretty much exactly the same way that you see it and you can Shield the individual sections because you see the shield actually comes down in between here with just a little penetrator down there for the uh for the trace going across there and just you know it just all works based on the overall system diagram and on Second Glance that does actually match up perfectly cuz these are relays look they're on the underside of the board but they're rlf so it's relay F and they go along and they num it d e f uh g h e and it goes so forth right up to the Picker in relay the Picker in output relay over here which is rlm there you go so these are those switching boards so it matches up precisely the individual blocks match up uh exactly to the system block diagram I love it and I love how you can just see the main signal flowing through that Center conductor that center micro strip conductor there this uh would be a controlled impedance uh Board of course it would have paid very close attention to that it's probably not even uh fr4 material it would be um some sort of uh you know a Teflon uh board or something like that some sort of uh high frequency uh better controlled impedance board than fr4 but you can see the micr strip run the signal runs straight through and then they've got these uh shielded bits and sort of like a penetrator here between each section like that so that just the micr strip Trace goes through brilliant now this part here is rather tricky you I can't get a socket down in there to actually undo those screws so you've got to actually shift there's a couple of screws on the side here you've got to loosen them and the whole thing actually just slides out a little bit and comes out more into that open Notch well I don't know why you just didn't put the huge notch in there anyway that's a bit tricky a here we go this is going to be good bloody hell of a lot of screws on there someone was really fond of these long black screws which presumably go down into the um uh diecast up walls to separate all the modules here we go Cy check it out beautiful oh I love it there it is warning burum under that RF transistor by the looks of it there so there you go that's about all they've got in here in terms of buril and they marked it on the silk screen brilliant and once again no surprise typical RF uh layout it's all modularized and they've uh got this um alloy um uh Shield inside that's not part of the diecast I can actually uh lift that um out if I wanted to it's a just it's one big uh board it's uh one big PC be but with that shielded um parts and they've even gone to the trouble to Shield inside the shield crazy but there you go that's the effort they've gone to there's a big um uh tag down here to connect to the um upper plate as if all the screw holes and everything else wasn't enough they had to actually attach it at that point uh down there as well and no doubt just like the board we saw on the upper side if you got out the rest of the the block diagram and looked at the rest of the modules that we have left you'd probably find that each one of these mapped to an individual part of that system block diagram and interestingly here's the penetrators along the top here and they're just uh rainbow ribbon cable down to the1 in um header down there and these penetrators obviously are like a DC signals they're not RF signals they're just DC control voltages or low frequency uh modulation signals or something like that so they don't have to go through um like a coax or anything like that happily um do it using ribbon cable now this section here goes through these penetrators into the um am modulation top uh far end part of the board and there's a deck here so that obviously contains the um uh the RF level deck and the am deck as well inside this section the harmonic filters they're probably over on this board over here and this board with the worn in burum uh compound these are probably the harmonic uh filters in this section of the board and you can see those on this system block diagram and one of these in here is probably the uh top octave uh processor or something like that maybe the uh local uh oscillator the voltage controlled oscillator perhaps or maybe that's um in one of these sections over here but I'm sure if you put a bit of thought into it and studied the block diagram you could easily figure out which module is which and down here we have a zarlink sp 8402 and that's a a very low phase noise divide by n device so there's our divide by n part of the block diagram and it probably contains the top octave processor in there as well and here's another zarlink device it's the SP 8400 as opposed to the 8402 we saw before and uh that is once again a very low phase noise device device and it's the fractional n synthesizer so that's the fractional n synthesizer block that we saw in our system block diagram easy and this section in here well we've got a Phillips um PM 7543 Dack so that's probably um this part of the system uh block diagram with the attenuation modu with the modulation converter and the step attenuator and stuff like that and I've taken the shield off those cans and that's probably the vco over here perhaps so that is in that part of the overall system so there you go that's a rough uh functional block breakdown of this device I love it and once again it clearly follows the system functional block diagram it's really neat and when you're designing these it just really helps to modularize these and keep them separate like this not only does it make uh sense from a shielding uh point of view and a layout board point of view and all that sort of stuff but um you really it it just makes uh sense from a system debugging point of view testing all that sort of stuff but really they've uh done well to get all this uh RF magic onto the one board there's a lot of effort there each individual subsection would have have to been individually uh tested and characterized and stuff like that before they did the final layout and up here at says it's only issue two of the board although there's another box next to it which says issue eight in a pen so maybe they've gone through a few revisions so I hope you enjoyed that a tear down on the Marone 2023 lots of RF magic in there I love it brilliant and if you like the video don't forget to give it a thumbs up if you comment if you got any uh comments on what you think parts of these uh circuitry do I haven't gone through it in detail at all then by all means leave it in the comments or jump on the eev blog forum and talk about it this has been a rather interesting bit of Kit I'll catch you next time

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 59,902

Keywords: marconi, instruments, aeroflex, 2023, 2023a, 2030, rf, signal, generator, teardown, options, frequency, amplitude, phase, modulation, oscillator, fraction, divide-by-n, vco, bfo, beat frequency oscillator, voltage controlled oscillator, pcb, layout, Voltage-controlled Oscillator, attenuator, level

Id: Gmryy5KWm_g

Length: 29min 47sec (1787 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2012