TSP #138 - Three Interesting Mailbag Reviews & Giveaway! (November 2018)

[Music] hi welcome to the signal pad in this episode I have three reviews of three items that are receiving the mail box which I think are all very interesting so I'm eager to show you what they're all about but before that I just wanted to give you a couple of updates as well a few videos ago I mentioned that I would give away the patreon proceedings for that particular video well we've done it I went to a website called one simple wish which is focused on granting wishes for mostly children in foster care so we're gonna hang on we granted about 20 wishes or so from different children from all around the country and I have to say it's both a rewarding and a heartbreaking experience because of you see how little it takes to give somebody something they really need so please if you can help go to that website and one simple wish Oregon and given or any other charity of your choice and thank you to my patreon supporters you guys are incredible not only are you helping a lab but occasionally I'll be able to donate this in your names because of all the contribution you are making and the other thing is that I promise I'm going to do more giveaway to everybody including my patreon supporters well today we're going to start with this kiss idea so X 11 o to G which is a two channel oscilloscope 100 megahertz to give the sample per second with a built in function generator this is a great thing to have on your bench and I wanted everybody to be eligible so in order to give an advantage to my patreon supporters this is what we're going to do so everybody who wants this and please only put a comment about wanting the item if you really need it so allow other people who actually can't afford it to have a chance so leave a comment that you wanted but make sure you are a subscriber because I'm going to take all my subscribers and I'm going to look at all the comments and then I'm going to draw from that at the same time if you're a patreon supporter you're automatically involved you're automatically included which means that if you leave a comment and you're a patreon supporter you actually increase your chances and to help you guys I'm gonna draw one from the comments and one from the patreon supporters and between those two I'm going to draw again and that's going to give more chance to people who are patreon supporters just so that I can support them in some way because of what they are doing to the website so this is just the first of the many giveaways it's going to be in the future there's going to be different kinds of instruments and even better instruments in this one although this is a pretty awesome thing to have on your bench so I mean your to get started with the reviews don't to do the thing I said subscribe leave a comment and if you're a patreon supporter you are there leave a comment also to increase your chances let's get started so our first item of interest are these fast rise and fall time edge generators these are really interesting units and we'll take a detailed look at them and these are from Leo Barton our electronic store and definitely take a look at them I put the link in the description so you can easily find the store and see all the other interesting things they have under store they also send me a coaster and a box of cookies which unfortunately is empty because somebody ate all the cookies but they also send me two versions of their edge generators one of them is using a BNC connector at the output and the other one is using a 2.9 2 millimeter connector to get even faster rise and fall time of course because the frequency response of the 2.9 to millimeter connector is far superior than the SMA we're really pushing SMA proper this year and they have used some interesting design techniques for that it also comes with an SMA mailed to mail converters so you can connect your 2.9 to millimeter connected to the instrument that you want but I'm going to use a 2.9 2 millimeter converter as well these are pretty expensive so this version actually is almost twice as expensive as this one because of the difficulty and creating that connector and making purchasing the connector itself now I'm a little bit surprised that they're using a female connector here I would have certainly used a male connector because most of the time test instruments have a female connector themselves which would make this to be able to be connected directly to an instrument without a conversion in the middle because you don't want anything any conversion but perhaps they couldn't source one or for whatever reason they thought the female version would work better but either way we're going to be able to connect this to a whole lot of different equipment around the lab but first we need to understand exactly how they work and take a close look at them and here we have the two units side-by-side the SMA and the 2.9 2 millimeter version now from an electrical point of view they're essentially identical they're using the same components same interfaces same functionality but of course the transition to a much better connector is first of all a little bit more difficult and also preserve the signal integrity in the bandwidth of the interface which is why the 2.9 to millimeter one is going to have better performance so let's take a look at the one on the left this is a BNC version in the center we have an 18 F a micro microchip microcontroller as series and this allows you to use the 3 wire into to configure the output driver I see which we will talk about in details and look at this block diagram and exactly how it works so this I see not only communicates with the output driver but also communicates with the USB allowing you to use a GUI to configure some of the parameters of the output driver and I'll show you that GUI too aside from that I don't think this microprocessor really does anything else on the top left we have a 10 mega res crystal now this is the source of the 10 mega R square V if that goes to the output and it goes to a little amplifier and splits into two and one of it directly goes from here AC coupled into our output driver and the other one goes into the trigger output it's nice that they have provided a trigger output because if you're using a subsampling oscilloscope you need a trigger in order to be able to synchronize the scope to the edge measurement you were trying to make and of course this makes it more usable as well if you want to jitter the correlated measurements on a regular rest of the scope so that you can trigger on this and measure on that and create an eye diagram and all of those good things so I'm glad to see that the trigger is included a USB connector pretty straightforward if you don't want to use the GUI interface all you need to do is to just provide power to it so it doesn't really need a computer interface as we shall see now if you look at the output driver here this is a differential and differential out but we're using an in single ended mode you can see one input family that there one input terminated there both in two capacitors so AC grounded and an AC coupled directly to the center pin of the BNC nice little circular holes that you can see all around the center pin removing as much to electric as possible to emulate an air transition dielectric as closely as possible and through the use dielectric losses it's a nice little interface transition which I'm sure they have optimized using AM simulation now all the views teaching on the ground path is nicely done there now of course you don't need to do all of this when you have a two point nine two millimeter connector because the transition is designed with the tolerances and the distances to already provide a very good interface now you don't have room here to remove the dielectric perhaps they didn't want to go through all that trouble it's really not necessary but you can get a very good transition there as well similar interface you can see a smaller capacitor two in parallel directly to the output allowing you to get even better rise and fall time same trigger same crystal same mic processor everything else really is the same the magic is all in the transition now you know we do work up to 100 gigahertz with such transitions but beginning a broadband transition to work very well is quite difficult rather than doing a narrowband one so having a good impedance transition across the wide frequency ranges can be challenging on the other side really nothing else going on just the their brand name the revision J I think this is the website and everything else is it's listed other than that it looks really nice I like the transition they've done on the BNC to optimize the performance as much as they can so we're going to now take a detail look at the block diagram of this icing and learn exactly how it works then once we're satisfied with that we can go around the lab and connect this to many different scopes and see what we get from the instrument and see what kind of performance we expect to see from the different brands of equipment I have here in the lab and here we have the functional diagram for the match three nine four nine I see now this is the I see that the racket drives the output of this edge generator blocks and you're dealing with basically these two outputs so how does this thing work anyway well this is nothing more than an AC coupled laser driver I see and its intended purposes for optical communication but it is rated up to eleven point three gigabit per second that means that in order for to produce a perfectly open eye diagram at eleven point three gigabit per second it has to have very fast intrinsic rise and fall time in this case is rated about twenty five people second of the I see with the qfn package it's all together so that means you should be able to produce very nice I that I was at eleven point three gigabit per second even after the laser diode modulation and that's exactly what this does now the intended purpose is for datacom but we were using it for its fast edge properties and just generating a square wave at its output getting them highest rise and fall time we can get from this plot now the input is intended to be used for from a backplane directly being draw driven into the IC so it has its own internal 50 ohm termination of course that's all normal this is how all of these ICS are supposed to be made and then we have an equalization block and this equalization gives you pre-emphasis before the signal is transmitted out of this IC and in fact the equalization is set to add to operate at 5.6 gigahertz and you can a couple of DB of Equalization pre-emphasis peaking essentially directly built into the chip if some of this sounds foreign to you I did make an episode awhile ago on the idea of a data transmission and signal Equalization where I go over all of these concepts and I actually show live demos of how an eye diagram is affected by various types of Equalization so make sure you check that some of this material is definitely covered there now because this is a laser diode modulator if the input signal is lost so if the data coming in disappears you want to make sure you disconnect the output and you start the modulation of the laser that's why there's a TX loss of signal detector which that goes over here and then can control the output directly and then you can even read that from a host processor that something bad has happened you can reverse the polarity of this signal going out so if you need to invert an olive invert that's transmitted polarity control is easy and at the output you have a differential pair open collector for high output current drive capability and then the terminations 25 ohm are actually also on chip and this is then goes out and intended to be AC coupled to a laser so it's very straightforward everything else is transmitted while setting up for altitude control and all the other things that of course are digitally enabled through an SPI interface of some concise question 3 wire interface so I whatever they're using in this case so really pretty straightforward nothing unusual there and we're using this as a with a square wave input so even the square wave input is not going to have very fast rise and fall time by the time it goes through this chip because it is an energy non-return-to-zero type generator you get rise time multiplication so you get very very fast rise time reduction because of how fast these circuits are internally and there is gain in the transmit path so you're able to get very good rise in photos so you don't have to put in very fast rise and fall time to get very fast time as long as you run it in a nonlinear mode so the chip is pretty straightforward and one of the other nice things about this is that they have written a little tiny USB fast pulse generator interface GUI which you can connect once you connect to there you as people you can then change the output amplitude and the calibration coefficients can be adjusted it's a nice little plug but you don't need to open it you can just directly plug it into power and then you get all the features how do you just get this square wave coming out of it so it's all set to be used now that we know exactly how it works and we have an idea of this construction we should be able to go ahead and connect it to some instruments I have so many scopes here in the lab and I'm very curious to see how each of those scopes behaves let's go hook it up to a lot of equipment so let's go ahead and measure some instruments now before we do that we have to establish a few things first of all I'm going to use the BNC version of the pulse generator for every instrument that has a standard BNC input once the input changes to high-performance BNC compatible inputs that I'm going to use the 2.9 to millimeter version with a proper conversion kit and I will show you that once we get there so for everything else let's go ahead with this one now in order to estimate the 3 DB bandwidth of the instrument you still need a couple of other information because you need to know what kind of front-end filtering is internally implemented inside the instrument is it maximally flat is it Gaussian responses in what kind of interpolation they're using but in all cases a number of roughly around 0.4 0.5 0.45 divided by the rise time which is defined as 10 to 90 percent is a good approximation of the bandwidth so in this case we have a rise time from the Ricoh des 6104 which is a 4 channel scope 1 gigahertz bandwidth 5 to go sample per second we're getting something in the order of 340 picoseconds on average now using 0.425 as a as a ratio for roughly estimating the bandwidth we get a band above 1.25 gigahertz which is more than the bandwidth that is written on the front and the front of the instrument and in fact if I remember correctly when I was testing this this does have a little bit more bandwidth than 1 gigahertz so there's a fairly good front end from that point of view so here's our first test for the ROI gold 1 gigahertz we're getting 340 port picosecond for the rise time let's go to another scope so how about the Lacroix hto 6104 this is a 12 bit scope 1 gigahertz bandwidth 2 and 1/2 Kiko sample per second for channels and Lucroy excels in their data processing that you can do when the data after is captured they have a really rich set of functions that you can apply to your waveforms so in this particular case we're getting a rise time of about four hundred and thirty Pico second which i if I use a multiplication of 0.425 I get about 990 megahertz of man but which makes sense is the one gigahertz instrument and you can see the individual dots this is a sine x over x interpolation individual sample points at two and a half a Giga sample per second it looks good seems to meet his spec and you're getting the numbers we're expecting to get and here's the Tektronix MD or 4104 C which is also a one gigahertz instrument five kilo sample per second on four channels this is a mixed domain instrument I did a full review and teardown of this is definitely one of the most versatile as sooo scrub mixed domain oscilloscope you can currently get because of the full spectrum and time domain and digital domain correlation methods that he has built into it so now on this one on channel one we're seeing a rise time of around three hundred and thirty three hundred and forty Pico second also which is about the same as the regal certainly meets is one gigahertz bandwidth requirements perhaps a little bit even more than that and it looks really good this is what you would expect to get from tech as well meeting that one gigahertz requirements let's keep going of course you're not limited to using instruments that have a 50 ohm termination you can use something like the rodent show us RTB 2004 which I've also reviewed extensively and this particular one has only a one mega ohm input 300 megahertz bandwidth and when you run this with a one mega ohm input the swing output of course is going to change because it doesn't have the proper termination anymore but that doesn't really matter so much because we're not pushing this to its limits anyway for an instrument that doesn't have 50 ohm input so you are still measuring the limitation of the scope even in that condition so we are we are seeing a rise in fall time of about 1.5 nano second which is consistent with a 300 megahertz bandwidth of the RTB 2004 so which means that you're still pretty good using this in one mega ohm input as long as you're not of course pushing it but there's not going to be no scope with a one mega input condition that has sufficient bandwidth to really push this unit to the edge of its performance so that looks good also let's keep going and here of course we have the Tektronix v series the eight channel oscilloscope certainly became one of my favorite oscilloscopes here in the lab that's why is sitting on the repair bench now because versatility is quick responsiveness and there's so many channels you have here to play around with now in this one we're still using traditional BNC connectors because of that I'm still using the BNC version of the edge generator there this is a 2 gigahertz oscilloscope front end bandwidth and that's where we're getting a rise time of around you know less than 210 picoseconds which corresponds to about two gigahertz of bandwidth and look how nicely it averages the way from it was a very good job at capturing an averaging and of course measuring the rise time and here you can even plot the statistics of this and so on but it's roughly about 205 to 210 Pico second so this looks good you can also measure this on all the channels looking for differences between the channels but they're also they were calibrated so they all have their frequency response compensated to give you the roughly the same result so it looks pretty good let's keep going so now as we move to higher bandwidth oscilloscopes we're going to have to change or connector a BNC it's not going to hold it anymore so here I have a special transition that transitions from a BNC compatible connector to a 2.9 to millimeter connector and then I have a 2.9 2 million with a converter to connect the rockie to this edge generator itself now this connector it costs a fortune but if you buy a scope that has high enough bandwidth they will certainly give you a number of these depending on how many channels you have so I have a couple of these because of the s-series oscilloscope from keysight which we'll get to in just a second now I did make a quick error there this is actually not AC coupled this is DC coupled with a 25 ohm a series resistor at the output as the datasheet requires so unlike the BNC version when this is DC coupled and this is a going to give you a little bit better bandwidth because of the fact that you don't have any parasitics associated with AC coupling something so when we do this we have to apply a half of what offset to the Scopes to Center the waveform but I made a mistake I thought those were capacitors they are not so here we have the keysight MSO x six thousand and for a this is a four channel 22 the sample per second scope it about six gigahertz of bandwidth and it has two built-in generators it has voice control so you can see we can talk to it and tell it to trigger and capture and stop it's very useful when your hands are busy working on a circuit it's a really a great instrument so having said that it's measuring a four time of about 65 picosecond 65 because ii is excellent because if i use a point four to five multiplication factor I'm going to get a bandwidth of about six-and-a-half gigahertz which I think in fact I've measured and it doesn't need have more than six speakers of bamboo but at least the very minimum it does meet it's 6 gigahertz bandwidth requirement and the fall time is a little bit faster on these units on the edge generators than on the rise time so I'm going to measure the fall time from now on on all the other instruments but as you can see we can get down to 65 picosecond with the MSO X 6000 and for a so how about the rodent show us our to-20 64 this is also a 6 gigahertz 20-year sample per second instrument excellent noise and performance on this unit as well now here I'm measuring the fall time and I measured it about 75 Pico seconds which is about maybe 10 to 8 Pico seconds slower than what I'm getting on the key side which is a little bit surprising perhaps has to do with the input filtering of this it still meets this 6 gigahertz band but it's just that the keysight one exceeds the 6 K or Spanish so the rise and fall times are going to be a little bit different but nonetheless this also has a high performance BNC connectors in the front because I'm using the same connector for it but as you can see we also have an excellent performance coming from the rolling Shores RTO 2064 and how about the keysight MSO as 804 a 8 gigahertz 20-acre sample per second again I've done a full extensive review of this instrument showing tons of different capabilities this is one of the lowest noise highest dynamic range instruments on the market and so we can see with this one we're getting under 52 picosecond on average for fall time which is to be expected this instrument has more than 8 gigahertz of man with eight point four gigahertz in fact of bandwidth and we're getting even less than we were getting with the other keysight instrument so now I have one more instrument that has even more bandwidth it's not actually an older unit but we want to see if I can push this to its limit but the keysight MSOs series meets the specification as well just like you would expect it and I've in my tests I've done I'm showing the enopp measurements of this instrument on constellation eye diagrams everything we can imagine this is a really great oscilloscope and here we are with the Agilent DSO 81 3304 a this is a 13 for the giggle sample per second instrument on four channels it's actually quite old it doesn't even have a USB port in the front so I have to power the module with a external battery but nonetheless this is the highest bandwidth be hamath before you can sign one per second and if you take a look we have a rise time of 40 just under 40 picoseconds 39 point one picosecond but if you go to the fall time as I was saying the fall time is indeed a little bit faster we're getting under 30 for picosecond so 30 for picosecond is now at the edge of the capabilities of this unit itself so I'm not quite convinced that we're measuring this instrument we might be measuring all the transitions and everything else disconnected to the edge generator itself to get less than 34 Pico seconds I know it's SPECT about 30 but that's probably at the edge of that connector I'm not quite sure but nonetheless you can see that we're getting very close to the 13 gigahertz bandwidth of this oscilloscope and we're getting the rise time we expect from a 13 gigahertz instrument so that kind of covers all these scopes pretty much I have in the lava lattice all the interesting ones so I hope that you enjoyed this review of these units I think they're very interesting and very cool to have in your lab certainly the higher cost version is only useful if you can take advantage of the 2.9 to millimeter connector and I wish you had a male connector but everything looks really good so let's go to our next item and our next item is this GPS Discipline oscillator now as you know GPS Discipline oscillators are extremely useful to get very accurate frequency reference so that you can lock multiple things together if you're looking for an extremely accurate reference has to log to the GPS now this is a pretty flexible one because not only does it lock the GPS it also is fully programmable to generate two independent outputs anywhere from essentially DC to about a gigahertz so right now it's by default configured to produce 10 megahertz and 200 megahertz differentially but you can configure in any way you want I'll talk about that and once we look at the schematic and the design of it there's also a bandpass filter here so that you can use an exactly 10 Meg or so you get a nice sinusoid out of this as opposed to getting the square wave out of the unit so it's really quite nice and flexible this is from the guys that SP one AFN I don't know if there's a particular way to pronounce that but this is SV one AFN comma put all the links everything you need in the video description these are the same guys who made these really awesome rulers these are microwave rulers you can see all different kinds of components labeled in the back and I have another version as well which is longer with a lot of really cool stuff on this is probably my favorite art rulers PCB ruler kind of things that I have here in the lab this is the same guys or designed is they also have tons of other project on their website definitely go check them out I'll put a link there so we can look at it but let's take them apart and see what's actually inside and here's what is inside this GPS Discipline oscillator as you can see very nice clean design the front and the back panels are all PCB and everything screws to each other quite nicely this one is a little bit crooked over here some early these internally this one is a power led there is a lock loss of signal LED and you're supposed to see them through the hole or through the a little thin section of this front panel PCB is very difficult to see but if it's dark enough it's okay now you have three main components here you have the GPS of course which connected to the antenna and you get the reference from that there is the stm32 microprocessor which controls all the communication interface and programming and configuring the output synthesizer the synthesizer is silicon labs and it is a jitter reduction frequency multiplier as synthesizer circuit which has two outputs so you can program these two outputs to any independent frequency you want pretty much anywhere from DC to over a gigahertz and one of them is taken out single-handedly and the other one is taken out differentially so you can get two completely separate frequencies everything locked to the GPS makes it really flexible and we'll take a look at the schematic and exactly how that is done in just a second there's also USB which you can download my information into and change the settings of the synthesizer but there is an EEPROM so once you download the settings you power it on everything is handled automatically you don't have to have it connected to anything other than power antenna and it will give you the frequencies you want it's very nice we'll go ahead and take a look at the schematic in just a second let me just quickly show you what's inside the low-pass filter or the bandpass filter as well and here is the ten megahertz bandpass filter used to create a nice 10 mega sinusoid in case you have locking the frequency to ten and this isn't a tunable LC filter most likely and it has these elves at the top which you can adjust of course there are already been adjusted for a 10 megahertz bandpass response one thing I forgot to mention is that everything here is designed and made in Greece which is great I don't know how many Greek followers I have but I have been to Greece and it's a really beautiful place so if you're from Greece drop me a line there alright now that we know how this is kind of looks like let's go to the schematic and block diagram understand how it works and do some testing so let's take a look at the schematic of this GPS Discipline oscillator and figure out exactly how it works now as with any GPS unit you're going to obviously the GPS module which is right over here now GPS modules are going to give you some time pulse at the output it could be at several different frequencies 10 megahertz or or 1 megahertz depending on the GPS module but you don't want to use that and multiply that because it's jitter is not going to be very good it's phase noise won't be good but it's frequency accuracy is very good so you could use that potentially in this configuration this is exactly what they have done if filtering a little bit with some LC filter and feeding it into one of the clock inputs of the Silicon Labs clock multiplier synthesizer and that allows them then to combine that with an onboard 50 megahertz 2 part per million temperature compensated crystal oscillator in order to create a very good frequency synthesis unit which uses the GPS as a reference but it uses the 50 megahertz crystal as the main crystal of the unit itself and the Silicon Labs where a clock multiplier 0 reduction unit which I'm going to talk about in just a second has two outputs the version they are using here the silicon labs 5 3 4 2 you can see that they have taken one of the outputs and they've connected to an SMA single ended and they've taken the other two outputs the other output differentially and giving you both the positive and the negative there are room for the board to even take advantage of the negative output as well from channel 0 if you really want to but this gives you a really sophisticated and flexible design because you can set this to be any frequency you want anywhere from VC pretty much to 1 gigahertz over a gigahertz so that you have the flexibility configure this to run different kinds of frequencies and different kind of synchronization now normally a good one would be to set let's say this one to 10 Meg's so you can synchronize your 10 maker's references among many instruments and then set the differential to be any other frequency and not every instrument is 10 Meg as reference sometimes they need 100 sometimes they need 600 depending on what it is that you're using and depending on how high the frequency of operation of the instrument you actually want to synchronize is so this makes it very powerful now to program this and put them into the EEPROM is a little bit tricky and simply because you have to open the unit and remove a jumper but there is a Python interface software they have written which talks to that list here talks to the SD and micro controller over there this ARM processors we communicate with that and then you can program and download and update them and write it to an EEPROM so that when you power the unit back on it goes to the last settings you programmed it into you can also download and use the silicon labs clock builder to configure the Silicon Labs IC to any combination you want and then download those settings using the Python code written by the creators of this module in order to upgrade and configure it so it is pretty straightforward once you you know start doing it once and use it and remove the jumpers I figured out how to do this unfortunately you can do it without opening the unit at least I don't think you can but once you figure it out it works quite nicely now this silicon labs clock multiplier jittered device to the reduction device this is this block diagram you can see it has multiple inputs depending on I think which version you're using but they're using the silicon labs 5 3 4 2 which has two outputs which both of them of course are available and then I use the clock coming from the GPS use the crystal that is directly on the board and then you can configure this synthesizer in any way you want to get any frequency you want so and nice a straightforward architecture at least from the top view does have a lot details in there obviously but the combination of EEPROM USB interface configurability frequency choice and everything that comes together in such a small package it makes it a very attractive unit to use if especially if doing ham radio features want to synchronize devices in the lab and have a programmable a low jitter a frequency generator that's a lot to the GPS and here are two outputs you can see right now they're nicely lock to each other occasionally there will be a small movement like I said I don't know how many satellites I have normally you do want to have quite a few satellites and you have to wait for this to settle but it's very nice and very stable so as you can see the 10 megahertz rubidium standard is a square wave because it doesn't have a band as will tonight but look how nice the sinusoid is coming out of this unit very well locked and very well filtered to get a nice single tone at the output now this is very sensitive to vibration every time there's vibration or movement or even gravity shift on the crystal inside the GPS controlled oscillator it will have to readjust and correct that because there's some small movement here again he was gonna go back slowly so if I were to go ahead and disconnect the GPS antenna it's going to go into a new mode called a holdover mode so I'm going to remove the GPS antenna and when I remove it we're going to have an unlock condition now as soon as it enters the unlock condition it's going to do its best to figure out the measurements it had done in the past within a certain window an average tours out and apply those in order to keep the correction as closely as possible now of course once it's not locked you can see that it's going to be some drift there's going to be some difference in the frequency it won't be perfect but the holdover mode which is fully configurable by the way from the GUI is very helpful to help maintain the frequency as close as possible using previous measurements in the in the presence of an unlock condition now I haven't let it build a history I just had it turned on for only a couple of minutes so I'm gonna let it go it's going to shift around quite a bit but if you look at if you let it run for a very long time it gets better and better at preserving the holdover mode let's hook it up to the frequency carrier and see what that says oh I actually forgot to show you the other two outputs let's go ahead and enable those and turn the channel one on to off and turn the other two channel on and there this nice being jittery because we're locking triggering on a different frequency reference there let me go ahead and change the trigger here I'm gonna put the trigger on channel 4 right there this there is our signal this is 200 megahertz nice and perfectly differential this is fully configurable to any frequency I want so I can set it to 1 gigahertz for example when we will do that I'm gonna take a look at the output and the spectrum analyzer as well but as you can see it's very powerful to be able to create any frequency that you want and here's the measured frequency directly on the Fluke PM six six eight five which is a rubidium standard frequency counter as well so right now you can see that the last digit is fluctuating of this is only five second gate so if you wait a little bit you'll see that it's going to change back to about ten megahertz it drifts a little bit back and forth for the last significant digit derivatives as ten megahertz again so yeah it seems to be working quite nicely like I said I am in the basement I don't have a lot of the satellites but nonetheless it seems to be doing quite quite well so it is locked to the satellite now the only other thing I want to measure is to take a look at the one gigahertz out but I actually changed the configuration to one gig and when I put it in the spectrum analyzer and see how that waveform looks like and how the face was actually looks like at one gigahertz so here's the output of the unit at 1 gigahertz as you can see I'm looking at a 1 gigahertz Center tone and that in the total sweep is about 50 megahertz here so we have a couple of tones close by which I haven't tried to get rid of this might be possible to eliminate by playing with that PLL settings is fractional integer mode or all the other combinations of bandwidth that you can set so I haven't tried to get rid of them but indeed indeed you're gonna show up in the phasers in this case there are only minus 45 DB C so if I go to the phase noise itself you can see the phase noise plot I'm going from a 100 Hertz officer to 100 megahertz offset and the phase noise has character characteristic shape you would expect from the instruments own phase noise combined with the phase noise of the GPS unit itself and this tone is the offset toward that you were seeing on the spectrum and of course it's going to show up on the phasers as a tone but it's ignored mostly because it's averaged out so if I look at the marker at a 10 kilohertz offset minus 109 DBC per Hertz is close to the instruments phase noise it's about minus 112 but if you go further let's say 1 megahertz we are getting in - 122 DBC verse which is significantly worse than the instruments we're really measuring the GPS unit which is not bad really for something that's so flexible and can be adjusted if you really want to see an absolutely good reference phase noise for testing instruments of course I've reviewed and showed you this at a signal hound unit here p NS p NCS - 1 1 gigahertz phase no standard which is so low phase noise and then when you connect it to pretty much any of their instruments it's going to be dominated by the instrument itself so you are measuring the instrument phase noise and that's why they created this but of course this is a fixed frequency one very different from something that you can adjust on the fly by comeback by playing around with the register settings so I think it looks pretty good I'm again all the information from this unit is going to be available underneath the video if you like to purchase one for yourself I think it's a nice unit if you want to have a very small portable gps reference that you can configure on the fly and the last item I want to talk to you about is the TSA D USB soldering iron now this is a very popular unit this is following the TS 100 which was also hugely popular and these are USB soldering irons and they're surprisingly good you wouldn't think that the suit USB soldering iron would be so capable but this is a very refined product at this point now this does support quick charge which means we can put quite a lot of power into it now the main advantage of something like this it is portability for me it's not going to compete with my JVC station which costs much much more than this and if I'm going to be at my desk I'm just going to be using the JBC tools but if you're going to be portable especially if you want to power this from a battery pack it is hugely advantageous currently what I have to do is use the portable soldering irons that you have to put fuel in and of course those are not temperature control this is fully temperature control as an LCD screen we can set many of the parameters so let me take a cost close look at it and it does support quick charge but it doesn't support PD power delivery which is unfortunate because all of my power banks have that feature so let's go ahead and see if we can trick it to do that using something in between the battery and the soldering station and let's take a close look at it now in terms of design this is really well done all aluminum chassis everything is precision machined all that screen in the front and the two buttons now these two buttons are used to set various parameters temperature and then settings but unfortunately in the middle there is no button I wish there was a button in the middle which would be there the Select or the enter equivalent of an Enter key because having to press these and long pause them and back and forth and wait for them it's just I don't understand why they didn't choose to put one more button in the middle but you know it's manageable once you get used to it now this is going to be a USBC connector 9 volts 2 amps so what 18 was can be put into this the tips are very easily replaceable and I have to say the quality is really good and I only have one of them now but I'm sure they come in multiple ones now the heater is of course in the element itself allowing you to dump the 18 watt of power very close to the you're trying to solder so I have to say very impressed with this and this part unscrews today you can change the tip while it is hot butter and that looks really good I have to say it very impressed with the design of it and there is a ground connector at the back which you can't connect to this and then you will have a grounded part as well it would be probably better if you need to unscrew this to ground so you can do it under go easily but does come with its own allen key to do that it also does come with its own power supply which is quick charge capable so I don't know that very nice now this is very very nice cable I wish all of you speak as well that is very flexible it doesn't burn it cannot burn there be burnt by the sternum area itself excellent excellent choice for this so let's go ahead and give it a try now I want to run it from my power bank so let me hook it up to the power bank and see how I can trick it to use PD so this is the power bank that I want to use this soldering iron with this is a huge huge capacity unit this is a power delivery+ twenty six thousand eight hundred milli amp hours and this is almost the maximum we can actually take with you on the airplane I've been very happy with it are the only issue is that this works only with power delivery so it does not trigger the quick charge of this particular siren so if I connect to it I'm only going to get five volts in which case this guy would not run at all but I have one of these guys this is the AV hcy I don't know if that's how you pronounce it but this one is I purchased this one directly from Amazon and this one has power delivery capability so it can test PD of any power source which means that if I connect my battery bank through this unit I can trigger the power bank to generate any voltage I want on the PD curve and then if I connect my soldering iron to this it will just see that voltage so I can just directly do it using that technique which is a little trick that I figured out I could do with these combination of this power bank and a cable so let's hook it up I can go ahead and connect this over here and I can connect this directly into the USBC input of this guy and as soon as I do that it's going to ask me if I'm sure that I understand the power delivery capabilities of it and I can say I got it and there it is nice generating five volts and it's of course not drawing any current but I can increase that to nine volts I can do 12 volts 14 volts and 20 volts so I can trigger the PD of this using this as an intermediary unit now you don't wanna go to 12 20 volts anyway because it's not rated for that but it doesn't matter it already knows if the voltage is too high and it will disable everything which is a fantastic feature especially if you're doing something like this so you don't damage everything so now that we have this we can go ahead and plug the directly to here right now we're sitting at 12 volts which is actually just a little bit over the the rating of the soldering iron itself but there will be some IR dropping all the cable because I'm going through so many things so it doesn't really hurt us it from that point of view we plug this in and we're going to get powered on and now I can change and I can turn it on directly so right now we're if you look at this number over here we have about 14 milliamp or so but as soon as I turn this on so that I can start hitting there this and look at that it is drawing 2.3 amps at almost 12 volts which means that it is doing something close to 28 watts which is crazy so you're getting 28 watts into a handheld soldering iron so with 28 watts and as you can see is reaching up to 675 degrees Fahrenheit which I've set it to we should be able to do some soldering tests with this I really like this combination and it's sitting on my desk and I can measure the voltage like this and I can figure out exactly how much current is drawing and it seems to work now if I go ahead and try and increase the voltage too much if I go higher you can see now it says high voltage so it protects the device against and if I go back down it will just simply resume and if I go way too low then you will say low voltage so this firmware that detects this is very handy and I can then change how much power I want to dump into so up to 12 volt it works now remember it actually tells me how much voltage is getting when the power draw is happening so when it when it's doing full power draw it goes down to ten point at 3 5 volts there's a lot of IR drop so it would be nice to get a shorter cable directly from at least from the power bank into this but other than that I think it works very well let's try some soldering stuff so let's try soldering something that is on a very large ground plane like this one this is a fairly big big ground plane of course it's gonna have a lot of thermal mass and I'm going to try and solder this directly on to it it's just a test of course now this is not necessarily representative every ground plane because this doesn't have vias going through it but nonetheless I think this would be a good test to try and let's see what we can do okay here we go this test is being done at 670 degrees Fahrenheit so let's see what we can do and I'm gonna add some solder see what it can do for us oh yeah the ground plane no problem look at that that is great I mean we are dumping almost 28 watts into it I have to say I'm really surprised how well something like this actually works that I can spread the solder around so easily at 670 degrees Fahrenheit I mean look at that this is this is great I would have never thought that a USB soldering iron can can work so well this component is really really old so I can't even get this harder to attach to it there you go I just got one part of it to start attaching and then no problem once you do that it flows without any issues yeah look at that I mean this whole part is completely molten and it moves around freely without any issues yeah this is great so you can see that by having the PD capability on dropping 28 watts or so on to it it works really well and I would imagine that for you know 80% of the things you want to do it would be no problem I mean look at that and it's crazy I can just paint with solder directly on this ground plane which is fantastic yeah I'd have to say it works really really well and there you have it I hope you enjoyed the review of these three different items don't forget to enter a comment and subscribe cuz that's how you'll be eligible to win the scope that I showed you the beginning of the video and there's going to be a lot more items in the future and to my patreon supporters thank you so much you guys are incredible and I'm going to put the good yous everything that you give into the channel so plus you in the comment section [Music]

Channel: The Signal Path

Views: 19,423

Keywords: Soldering Iron, Power Delivery, USB-C, Fast Pulse, GPS, Oscillator, gps disciplined oscillator, Teardown, AVHzY, USB Tester, Quick Charge, Ground Plane, VCO, Silicon Labs, Jitter Reduction, Phase Noise, Keysight, oscilloscope, rohde \& schwarz, Rigol, Agilent, LeCroy, Tektronix, SMA, 2.92mm

Id: T-G4OhWSyIo

Length: 41min 53sec (2513 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 11 2018