Hello,
I had asked about providing support to Spike for external down conversion several years ago. Looking at the latest version of Spike, it still doesn’t provide support. It would seem like an easy feature to add and would save me a lot of time.
I would expect to provide the LO, the sideband, mixer loss (or maybe a way to calibrate it).
Shown is a down-convertor for the X-band, using a 12GHz LO. For a quick demo, a LiteVNA64 was set to 5.9GHz and measure directly with the BB60C. Next the LiteVNA64 was attached to the down convertor and set to 6.1GHz. 12 – 6.1 = 5.9. Also shown are the two overlaid.
Maybe the person uses a 6GHz LO with the upper sideband, or 6.1 – 6 = 0.1G for the previous example.
Both the down converter and BB60C are referenced to my GPS. That bit of drift is the from the LiteVNA64.
