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Showing posts from April, 2020

Radios and Attenuators

When you need to test two radios in a lab, they are awfully close together and may not work over the air, since the transmitter will overdrive and saturate the receiver.  You may even damage the receiver since the radio front end is very sensitive and the transistor features are extremely small.  If you would accidentally touch the antennas of two radios together, you could instantly melt the receiver front end. DIY 90 dB(?) Attenuator To avoid this melt-down problem, military manpack radios are usually built with power transistors on the front end - the same ones used in the power amplifier.  Since power transistors are expensive, commercial radios are usually not so rugged. Path Loss If your transmitter operates at +30 dBm (1 Watt) and the receiver has a sensitivity of -90 dBm (1 nano Watt), then to work properly, you need a path loss of 80 to 90 dB, to bring the transmit signal down to a safe level of about -60 dBm. You can then hook the two radios back t...