It's that time of year...

Spring is in the air.  The grass is green.  The nights are cool and days are warm.  Wait a second, it's September!!

The other day, I was sitting at the dining table drawing up circuit board artwork for some RF filters when I looked out the window and saw a pair of squirrels hard at work, making new squirrels.

In the face of adversity, nature finds a way...  to hump on top of a fence.

Needless to say, squirrels making more squirrels on top of the fence outside the kitchen window was a bit distracting while I had serious engineering work to concentrate on.

Work and bike racing have conspired to make this a very busy summer, with blog posts being rather sparse.  I thought I would take a minute or two to share something I have been working on.

Pictured below is a test set-up for a baseband synthesizer I am developing for Holzworth Instrumentation.  The discerning viewer will notice a couple spots where I ripped parts off the demo boards and soldered in modifications.  I'm pretty sure that voids the warranty, but that is a significant part of what makes electrical engineering fun.

Electronic test equipment in the background makes for very sci-fi looking blog pictures.  However, there is no fiction going on in this picture.  It's all real!

For a bit of background; the instruments in the background are an oscilloscope (on the left with the big screen) and a spectrum analyzer (on the right with the small green CRT display).

The oscilloscope, built by Agilent Technologies (where I worked a couple years ago), measures electrical voltage as a function of time, providing the engineer with a graphical representation of how signals change over time.

The spectrum analyzer (built by HP, now Agilent Technologies) measures electrical/RF power as a function of frequency.  In other words, it analyzes the spectrum and tells the engineer where, in frequency, the power in a circuit is located.

The little red boxes attached to the circuit boards are Holzworth HX2410's, amplifiers that convert sine waves into square waves (with engineer-adjustable voltage levels!).  They are very handy bits of kit to have around the lab for clocking digital circuitry.