Re: Please Help--Newbie seeks quality Signal Generator

AFAIK, no such instrument exists.

Complex waveforms at 1000MHz? Damn near impossible even today unless you have the sort of money only large corporations have.

Ron -

It sounds like even if a signal generator existed that met your original specifications it alone would not be able to accomplish what you are after. Being able to generate the strong fields that you require is going to take a lot more power than signal generators are capable of. Another problem will be to convert the RF energy into a magnetic field. A typical electromagnet is not going to work at high frequencies due to the magnets inductance, which will make it even more difficult to feed them just from a generator. Your project does sound interesting, however, you will need to look into the realism of being able to create your fields with available signal sources and components. Regards - Mike

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Mike B. Feher, N4FS

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There are function generator kits around which will do the low end stuff up to 10 MHz or so. There is even an Exar chip for a few $ which will do it with few external components. I think the number is XR038.

Mike is quite correct on the difficulties with driving electromagnets, you have to know what you are doing. Up to a few kHz you may use a ferrite core and get half a Tesla flux density. Lower that this, iron cores may give you up to two Tesla. Properly shape your pole pieces to get a good field across the gap. Or maybe wind a big Helmholtz coil for a lower but more linear field.

Best regards,

Bill C

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Thanks for all this help!!

Ed

The Exar is a 8038. It is an old design, so I would recommend using a newer design from Maxim, the MAX 038. You can get the PDF datasheet and a sample chip from: