Bob Albert via time-nuts wrote:
Does anyone know of an inexpensive prescaler for a counter that goes beyond 2 GHz? I would actually like to find a kit but everything seems a bit pricy. I currently have capability of 500 MHz and that will stretch to about 700 with care. So a divide by 10 would be ideal.
If you're good at kit-building, you might take a look at the Ebay items 160703629055, 181982380658, 400265187641, and 60703624281. These are PCBs made to specifically fit a number of frequency divider chips. Each board holds a single divider chip and associated components, such as the decoupling caps, bias resistors, and pads for interconnections. A series of these boards that add up to a divide-by-100 can get you to 2 - 5GHz easily. I've never used any of these boards or dividers, but I have used a few of the seller's amplifier boards, with great success.
There's also a construction article from Silicon Chip magazine (Oct, 2006) dedicated to constructing a 2.8 GHz 1000:1 prescaler for counters. The PCB layout and all the active parts are available. Send me an email for a copy of the article.
I don't know of any prescaler chips that get you a divide-by-10 prescaler at your target frequency range. There might be (probably is) one available... I just haven't run across it.
BTW, which frequency counter do you have? There might be a better solution for you than an external prescaler.
Cheers, Dave M _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
