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Old October 6th 06, 09:20 PM posted to rec.radio.amateur.homebrew
Joel Kolstad Joel Kolstad is offline
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First recorded activity by RadioBanter: Jul 2006
Posts: 102
Default PSD on a spectrum analyzer.

Hi Roy,

That's a lot of extra detail; thanks!

"Roy Lewallen" wrote in message
...
Morris was the driving force behind Tektronix's entry into the spectrum
analyzer market, and the group's chief engineer and architect for a long
time. He'd retired by the time I joined the group, and I only met him when
he taught a couple of one-week courses based on his books. He's truly one of
the experts in the field.


Was Dennis Rosenauer around while you were still at Tek? Last I heard (a
couple of years ago), he was working on their spectrum analyzers. As you're
probably aware, Tek pretty much dumped spectrum analyzer development for
awhile in the '90s, and something like 3-4 years ago hired Elaine May to be
the new product group manager... she having been layed off when *Agilent*
decided to dump *their* spectrum analyzer development! Sheesh. Rumor had it
she was trying to get a a bunch of her former co-workers from Agilent to join
her up at Tek.

These days Tek and Agilent seem to have realized that SAs are rather
important, albeit with Agilent pursuing a more "traditional" architecture
(very high frequencies, mix down to IF, digitize there) but Tektronix
utilizing their high-speed ADCs from their scopes to just digitize directly
and compute FFTs -- this approach limiting them to lower frequencies with
noticeably less dynamic range, but giving them the advantage of being able to
trigger on arbitrary masks withoug ever "missing" one.

---Joel

P.S. -- Planning to visit Swaptober Fest on the 21st?