Pretty Cool eBay Find

Seems that most of the $90 was for shipping; in any event what a colossal bargain!

Cool. Got any pics of the antenna?

I would have taken some but it was too big to fit into my Volvo :-) It's still at work, I have to figure out how to get it home.

Mark

Mark,

Thanks for the eBay URL, but eBay seems to cause my browsers problems so...

VERY INTERESTED! You said looks good on the spectrum analyzer. What means that? Any regulatory compliance markings?

Like to see pictures, can you send to above email address? and gmail doesn' seem to like .zip files, doesn't seem to mind .jpg's though.

There are some 'enhancements' you can add to REALLY make this thing effective by the way.

Well, tonight's challenge is breaking into the Administrator account so I can back up the original files. Since its windows XP a bootable CF drive should work for that. Then I should be able to replace the SSD with a good old magnetic type, switch the OS to something more bearable, such as Windows 7 embedded, and see if I can hack the custom programs back to life.

The end goal here, is that I should be able to build a pretty slick little experimental radar platform. The computer should be fast enough to run Xilinx ISE for the ADC/DAC board, might need to upgrade the RAM from the 2GB it has right now. Right now the signal is being generated by the AD9858 DDS developer board. It would be nice to replace that with something which could generate arbitrary and more interesting stimulus signals.

After talking to the guys that built the unit, 3d-radar, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get any info from them. Nallatech who made the FPGA DAC/ADC board on the other hand, were nice enough to send me the developer kit for free. I'm not sure if you have ever had to deal with companies that make those sorts of boards before, but normally they just tell you to take a hike, so I was very surprised.

Mark

Did you ever determine the operating frequency? Power levels? Hope you get it working as it sounds like a really interesting project.

Oh yeah, I did learn a bit more because I found the manual on the hard drive in the unit. It says it's a 30MHz-3GHz stepped waveform. It says that it is coherent, but I'm confused about that because I don't see any common clocking to the ADC? Maybe I'm wrong, but I would expect in a coherent receiver design that there would be some form of loopback, like a two channel setup for matched filtering in the digital domain? Not really sure.

Since they are using the Analog Devices card to generate the output, there must be some frequency multipliers in there somewhere. I really need to draw out a schematic of the analog section, which should be pretty easy since there isn't a single custom part in the thing.

Power output I'll have to measure later, but it looks to me that the final amplifier is in the antenna. I am just guessing because I don't see any large amplifiers in the unit itself, not even anything with a heat sink on it. There are separate RX/TX cables running to the antenna. Not sure if they used circulators in the antenna or there are separate antennas for RX/TX.

Mark

Is there power to the antenna? Is the manual a pdf? If so, maybe you could post it somewhere.

By being coherent, they most likely mean a reference oscillator is used to generate the Tx signal as well as the LO for the Rx. Usable doppler is retained.

Is there any source code available? A circulator for 30 to 3000 MHz would certainly be an interesting device to say the least.

I put the manual here. But it's pretty sparse. I didn't catch anything about power output.

Mark

Here is the sch for the analog section of the radar:

Mark

Very cool stuff. Can't wait to see what kind of imagery you're able to obtain when you (inevitably!) get this puppy working.

-- john, KE5FX

Cool indeed.

And just think, you spend hours in line for imaginary security.