Building an RF Generator

I got this small RF generator from AliExpress. It goes from 35 MHz to 4.4 GHz. The display is a 2.8" touch screen.
And as before with other projects I wanted this one too to be installed into a TM500 plug in.




It consists of one circuit board with with the display on one side and the components on the other and a shield board attached on the component side.

The picture is from internet.

The board had two straight SMA edge connectors for RF and MCLK. With cables attached it became too wide to fit into a TM500 plug. So they had to be replaced

by 90 deg angled connectors. Angled SMA connectors for edge mounting were nowhere to be found so I had to modify a couple of throuh-hole connectors.

Like the VNA project this one also had to able to operate from three power sources, one internal from the TM power supply with power only, one from the front

panel USB connector providing full USB connectivity and finally one USB connector from the rear panel of a TM5006 mainframe via the interface connector

also providing full USB connectivity. None of these three connections should be allowed to interfere with any of the other so I made a custom power supply board.

If one of the power sources is active none of the others could be activated until all have been turned off.
Schematics of the power supply here.

The hardware for the plugin came from someone's scrapped custom project with a double width plugin which was kindly supplied at no cost by Walter at

Sphere Research in Canada.  The interface connector was sawed off from a scrapped AM503 board.

The finished plug from the lef side .....
 

.... from the right side ...
 

... from inside ... 

 ... and from the front. This deivice can be controlled  from a PC via USB and most seller have a screen shot of a software that does that in their add but none

provide a link to download it so it is yet to be found.

The shape of the signal varies with frequency. According to spec it should be squarewave below 2.2 GHz and sinewave above 2.2 GHz.

Email me with comments. /Håkan