Jim,
This reminds me of a project I did back in the early1990's. (Hopefully
we have advanced a bit since then.) It used a bunch of quad latches, some
74138's, a UART, and an RS232 converter. It drove a PTS 40. The UART used
the first 4 bits for BCD frequency and the last four bits to address which
decade on the PTS. It was for a frequency hopping amateur radio project that
I never finished but that part worked as hoped.
As far as radar frequecy hopping, I spent several years in the US Air
Force where our X band radar magnatrons were tuned hydraulically. 3000 PSI
on a slug in the maggie tuned it very fast!
Al, retired, mostly
At work, I'm putting together a multichannel stepped frequency CW radar
breadboard, and I'm looking for something to serve as a source that I
can step quickly.
I'm looking at stepping every millisecond or so. Right now, I use a
Ardunino type microcontroller driving a serial DAC driving a VCO, but
that's a bit wonky and noisy, although it's easy to get the step timing
right on. The spectral purity is, shall we say, downright ugly.
Since I'm going to be doing precision ranging with this, the spectral
purity has to be reasonably good (not 1E-15 at 1000 seconds good,
fortunately)..
I was thinking about a PTS synthesizers (beloved of time-nuts for all
kinds of reason), and they're nice because they are quiet, and switch
really fast (microseconds). However, they all seem to have BCD or GPIB
interfaces (only). Sure, I can code up something on an Arduino or other
microcontroller to drive the BCD on the PTS, but maybe there's something
else out there that might work as well? And is already off the shelf.
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