Assistance Confirming Power Restrictions

[Daniel West]

A customer is having an issue with one of our aircraft GPS antennas. A coworker of mine happens to have an RF Explorer Spectrum Analyzer and Signal Generator set, though he is out for training the next two weeks with no access to communications.

I have been able to stumble my way through a FieldFox to get cable readings but have been unable to understand the SA portion of its capability. Luckily I’ve got the RF Explorer SA in hand and it seems much more straight forward. The only concern I have now is the signal strength going into the device, since I don’t want to risk damage, I thought it would be best to reach out to yall in the meantime.

I’ve glanced through the manual and don’t have any reservations beyond the power limiting table. My antenna(attached, where the file name is the full PN) does have an LNA but I'm not sure if the RF Exp. would power it, or if it just goes unpowered with our powered splitter not in the loop. 

It doesn’t seem like his kit has any external attenuators, and I see that some have built in attenuators but, I cant seem to find out what model I am holding. SN is B3A7B59ALKA4EEC5. During start up, it seems like it has 64KB RAM and 2MB ROM extra, I don’t know if these are indicators to add-ons or not.

Thank you all!

[RF Explorer]

Hi,

What specific RF Explorer model are you using?

Regards,

RF Explorer Team

[Jason Holland]

Daniel,

Spec sheet shows that this antenna will work passively as well as actively.  RF explorer has no DC bias, so any power to the antenna would need to be supplied separately.  If you want to take measurements on the antenna when it’s powered, then you should invest in a DC block (https://rflambda.com/search_dcblock.jsp?gclid=CjwKCAjwrfCRBhAXEiwAnkmKmWs0CUCE5GX9ElNeGWM0GsL_gvNaW47Gb4fndhFfm7b_g9xWI9KNdRoCBIYQAvD_BwE)

And an attenuator (your antenna lists a 1W amplifier), so you don’t overload the front end of the RFE.

Good Luck!

-Jason

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[Daniel West]

Thank you both!

I am not certain on the model, the info provided is about all I could find. I could have missed a page in the settings or so.

If I run into any other issues, Ill reach out again!