How do radio amateurs use RIGOL’s DSA815? And for what kinds of applications?

Posted on: December 14th, 2020 by Doug Lovell

Some simple examples of useful Radio Club application: An FM Broadcast Station was causing interference to our 2m to 4m transverter. This corresponded to an FM station which was recently launched. There were no problems before this Broadcast station went live: “We were able to identify all of the transverter RX output signals (wanted and spurious)” On the DSA815-TG the tracking generator can be used in zero span mode as a high quality signal source: “sweeping the FM broadcast band, and up popped a carrier on the output corresponding to 102MHz on the input, which was on an image channel of one of the two IF’s”. Rigol-UK’s customer used the DSA815-TG to find and fix the interference “we selected a Clansman band pass filter and tuned it for the 4m band using the DSA815-TG as a Spectrum analyser” These engineers were then able to tune their filter for max signal “On inserting a strong signal on 102MHz, there was no longer any spurious image signal at the output. Everyone was very impressed with the analyser and how it enabled the problem to be quickly identified and a filter to be tuned and demonstrate that the problem had gone away.”
The next step is to use the analyser to tune a coax stub filter to notch out the broadcast signal and take out the Clansman band pass filter.
In a separate test the Radio Club turned to antenna tuning to “show the response plot using a directional coupler”.