[Elecraft] Analog vs. Digital Front Ends

[brian]

Look at the A/D converter as a chip tool that could potentially be used 
in ham RX design.

If one wanted a ham band RX using an A/D front end,  certainly one would 
add front end filters.

Of course, that would only help solve the problem with out of band 
signals.  Handling the vector sum of in band signals would still have to 
be designed for.

The concept however is a good one.  Who knows where these A/D chips will 
be in 2, 5 or 10 years.

I remember when GPS was in its infancy.   Many people thought it was 
crazy to think that a bunch of low orbit non-geosynchronous satellites 
could be used for extremely accurate positioning. Besides the ground 
equipment required would be too expensive for most users.  History 
proves them wrong.


73 de Brian/K3KO



On 9/16/2015 12:25 PM, Joe Subich, W4TV wrote:
> On 9/16/2015 12:43 AM, Alan wrote:
>> So how long before ADC technology catches up to the K3? If Moore's
>> law applied (doubling of performance every couple years) it wouldn't
>> be long. Unfortunately Moore's law applies mainly to digital
>> circuitry but the key parts of an ADC are analog (the "A" in "ADC").
>> Unless there is a big theoretical breakthrough in ADC architecture, I
>> think we still have some years to wait.
>
> The question really boils down to when will we see affordable high
> voltage ADCs.  The problem is that every signal in the input passband
> is in series and the [peak] voltage adds as a vector sum.  So if one
> S9+63dB (-10 dBm) signal causes the ADC to overflow (consistent with
> the noise loading limit in the AB4OJ/VA7OJ tests of the Flex-6000
> series) the ADC limit is 0.1V (peak) at the antenna.  Spread that 0.1V
> across multiple [equal strength] signals and you see the following:
>
>      N      "S"
> ----------------------------------
>      1     S9 +63 dB (-10 dBm)
>      3     S9 +53 dB
>     10     S9 +43 dB
>     32     S9 +33 dB
>    100     S9 +23 dB
>    316     S9 +13 dB
>   ~450     S9 +10 dB
>   1000     S9  +3 dB
>  ~1400     S9  +0 dB (-73 dBm)
>
> Since it is the instantaneous peaks that cause problems, increasing 
> the number of signals decreases the frequency of the ADC overflows.  
> There
> is certainly analysis that can be done to compute the probability of a
> peak given a specific number of signals and frequency distribution but
> my best guess is that the number of signals involved will be somewhere
> between 10 and 100.  Of course, if one of those signals is very strong
> - a 1.5 KW neighbor 0.5 miles away or a broadcast station that puts
> a few volts on any wire in the air - it does not take many (if any)
> additional S9+10 dB signals to push the system over the edge.
>
> 73,
>
>   ... Joe, W4TV
>
>
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