Tripping over SWR

Well,

I've been thinking some more about the linear for 23cm I started back here, and more importantly how I can generate a high SWR trip signal for the control board.

I have one of these directional couplers:


It has a forward and reflected port at -30dB. Then I remembered I had one of these kits, which built looks like this:






This will turn the sampled RF into a -ve DC voltage for the SWR trip on the control board.

Now, fortunately or unfortunately we now need to do some maths to determine the attenuation needed. The RF detector board contains two samplers, I have configured one for the forward power and one for the reflected.

So, starting with the forward port:

Assuming a maximum output from the linear of 150W, we can convert that to dBW using:

So my 150W RF becomes 21.8 dBW. Therefore the maximum power at the forward port of the directional coupler is 21.8 - 30 = -8.24 dBW.

Given that the maximum input power to the detector part of the board needs to be 3mW or 0.003 W we can also calculate that 3mW = -19 dBW.

Therefore I need an attenuation of the difference which is roughly 16dB.

Then assuming a trip level of 1.8:1 (or about 10dB return loss) the reflected levels need to be 10dB down from the forward so an attenuator of 6dB is needed on the reflected port.

Using my signal generator at 1,000 MHz (1 GHz) and adjusting the output we find this is the response of the board:


So it all looks pretty good.

I now need to do some reading up on how I can drive the trip alarms on the control board, but this should do the trick nicely.

Here's the dogs doing what dogs do:


Local conditions.