Greg,
The XG3 is a fine and easy to use tool. It is useful for a lot more
than just calibrating the S-meter. When used with the XG3 Utility, it
can serve as a full function signal generator with sweep capability.
Yes, the output is a square wave, but as soon as the signal is fed into
a receiver, the filters turn it into a sine wave.
The only limitation of the XG3 is that it cannot do extremely low levels
because the plastic case has some low level leakage - even a step
attenuator is not effective at extremely low levels unless the XG3 is
put inside a metal enclosure. I pressed my old HP8640 into service for
any low level testing (like MDS testing). My mil-spec HP8640 would go
down to -140dBm without leakage because it had all the internal shield
boxes with all screws intact.
73,
Don W3FPR
On 3/24/2020 3:41 PM, Greg Troxel wrote:
Bill Smith via Elecraft <[email protected]> writes:
Looking at buying the XG3 signal generator to calibrate S meters.
Particularly thought it would be very useful to calibrate the S meter
in the HDSDR SDR software I use now. I read the S meter calibration
instructions in the manual and was happy to see how simple it is. If
I had tried to use my old Tektronix signal generator I would of had to
buy an RF Power meter to measure the amplitude and a Step Attenuator
to adjust for -73db/50uv.
No, but I intend to do this. It's certainly simple on the XG3 side; the
possibly hard part is on your receiver's side.
Beware that the XG3 output is a square wave. I am 99% sure that this
means the stated power of e.g. -73 dBm is the power of the desired
frequency, and the power of the third harmonic is not included in that.
Certainly that is what you'd want for receiver testing as a ham receiver
should be expected to not respond to the third (fifth, etc.) harmonic.
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