Hi RF explorers,So now I have my gadgets back from Santa's elves (I had them wrapped for Christmas) I have had more time to experiment.
I discovered the menu items 'Offset dBm' and 'Frequency Span' affect the visible noise level on the screen w.r.t. the Y axis so it may have been that, when delivered, the pre firmware upgrade settings were different to the post firmware settings.
It seems I may have been fooling myself?
So, now I have two RF Explorers, a 2.4G and a brand new Christmas 3G Combo, but I now have a new dilemma.
Having learned my previous lesson about making sure all settings are identical between both machines..LOL!
So I have been looking at signals in the 2.4GHz band and comparing sensitivity between the two RF Explorers.
If I generate a 2.4GHz signal from my ADF4351 signal generator and feed it into first one RF Explorer and then the other I find that the 3G Combo reads 10dBm higher than my older 2.4G RF Explorer.
I have tested the brand new 3G Combo at 'spot' frequencies from HF to 1GHz with my Marconi 2019A and the levels are within +/- 0.5dBm so that's great.
So I can only conclude that my older 2.4G model is reading 10dBm low
Now having discovered the 'Offset dBm' menu I could compensate for this and 'fool' the 2.4G Explorer but this complicates measurements if I need to add external attenuators in later measurements.
There is a health check link somewhere where you can send a test log back to RF Explorer I think?
Would this discover a low gain RF Explorer I wonder?
Thanks in anticipation
Dave