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Hi. My name is Neil Forcier. I’m an application engineer with Agilent Technologies and today
I’m going to talk to you about an optional feature on the 53230A universal counter. That
optional feature is pulsed microwave measurement capability. Found on the microwave channel,
channel 3, it can measure up to 6 or 15 GHz. So, the idea here is this type of feature
is helpful in radar applications, electronic warfare applications and also some communication
applications. To show an example of it, I have Agilent’s MXG signal generator, basically
simulating my pulsed microwave signal. I have one at 1 GHz, with a pulse width of 10 microseconds,
at a rate of 1 kHz. We can see the signal on the scope just sort of in the pulse form.
If I back off a little bit, we can actually see the sine wave. The 1 GHz carrier frequency
sine wave. Now, on the counter, what we can measure on this type of signal is the pulse
width, the pulse repetition rate, the pulse repetition interval, and finally the burst
frequency or the carrier frequency. So here’s the measurement. I have the pulse repetition
frequency displayed right now at 12 digits of resolution. If I switch over to the pulse
repetition interval, which is just the inverse of the measurement we just saw. Then to the
pulse frequency or carrier frequency, we can see 1 GHz. And then finally the burst width,
which is approximately 10 microseconds. So, the advantage to using the counter for this
type of application or this type of measurement – there’s basically three big advantages:
The first is accuracy resolution. High accuracy, high resolution. It’s a counter, it’s
a timing device. The second is cost. It’s fairly low cost compared to normal solutions
in this application space such as a wide bandwidth scope or a spectrum analyzer. And then finally,
ease of use. In a test system, with just a couple of commands, I can get a measurement
off of the counter quickly. So that’s all I have, thank you for watching.