RF Explained

RF Explained Episode 5 – In this episode of RF Explained, we want to get hands-on, with a mmWave setup using the VXG and UXA to generate a 60 GHz 5G NR FR2 signal. You've learned what RF signals are and a few common devices. Now, it's time to get familiar with the instruments and learn how to set them up to generate and analyze signals.

Transcript:

Welcome back to another episode of RF Explain. I'm TJ Cartwright, a product marketing engineer here at Keysight. Today we have a very special guest, Antonio Castro, from our research and development team. He’s here to help us set up our signal source with our signal analyzer. Let’s get into it.

Hi, my name is Antonio Castro I’m an electrical engineer with Keysight. Today I’m going to show you the VXG. We’re going to generate a 60 GHz millimeter-wave at 400 GHz of bandwidth. Here we have the VXG and what I’m doing here is setting the frequency to 60 GHz. The amplitude of the signal is -10 dBm and I’m going to turn the RF output on. The waveform that I’m going to use is a 5G NR FR2 waveform at 400 MHz.

Now let’s go to system and what we’re going to do is configure The analyzer from the VXG. So I’m going to hit configure. I’ve already set up the IP address of the analyzer. So we will hit auto-configure and here on the N9042B, the analyzer will show as configured. The settings, however, are not optimize to measure EVM. What we need to do is go to measurement setup then click on optimize EVM. This adjusts the attenuation settings and the system gain.

Now we will make the same measurement on the N9041B. What we have to do is take the IP address of the N9041B and enter that into the VXG. This will set up our signal analyzer to demodulate the signal we are generating with our VXG source.

The importance of the hardware that we have here is that we now have a signal generator frequency extender that allows customers to generate millimeter-wave signals up to 110 GHz. In addition, they have two choices. They can use the N9041B which has a 1 mm connector on the instrument. They can also use the N9042B, which has the option of a frequency extender that allows customers to bring the analyzer to the DUT and not the DUT to the analyzer.