-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Nov 4, 2008, at 2:31 PM, Bill Stevenson wrote:
I have a rudimentary question about the attenuator. When I was searching some questions in the archive, I found that some guys mentioned when testing the transmitter and receiver for daughter board, the antenna should be connect by Tx/Rx SMA, the Tx and Rx can NOT be connected directly by cable and we need a attenuator about 40-50 dB!! What is the meaning of attenuator here? Is it a hardware? Thanks a lot for all!
An attenuator is a piece of hardware that weakens ("attenuate" means weaken) the power of a signal transmitted along a wire. When you directly wire a TX board to an RX board, the power transmitted is much stronger than receiver expects (even a tiny bit of air gap induces a lot of attenuation) and can fry the circuitry. So we simulate this air gap with an attenuator.
Fixed RF attenuators can be had for fairly cheap ($10-20) I think. - -Dan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) iEYEARECAAYFAkkR4SkACgkQy9GYuuMoUJ5w4ACeONoqxFnQ+EEquRngohFnpN9v j6AAoKE20VQNzDoDSOAx4oIaA/KPkOxA =Satt -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
