hello ) writes:
I have a question about the design of 2nd mixer in the IC-7800.
From : http://www.icom.co.jp/world/products...7800/index.htm
man could see that Icom use an oscillator with outputs in quadrature and
then sum the mixer outputs after a 90° phase shifter.
What I don't understand , is why do they do the 90° phase shift in the
analog domain ?
Using 2 mixers with a quadrature oscillator is very common in the DSP
world (IQ demodulation). But in general , it's followed by 2 A/D
converters and if phase shift is needed to reject a side band, it's done
digitaly...
I don't think that Icom choose this design just to save an A/D in the
IC-7800 ....
any clues ?
Thierry
F4DWV
This may be an issue of design philosophy.
That stage is doing a conversion down to a very low IF (it's not clear
what frequency from the block diagram), and is presumably low enough that
the image is within the roofing filter passband. Narrowing the roofing
filter might be problematic (because it would limit the available bandwidth,
or because it's too costly to have a narrower roofing filter), but they need
to knock out the image caused by that second mixer. By using phasing,
it attenuates the unwanted image, in the same way that phasing techniques
can knock out the unwanted sideband when generating SSB.
Perhaps they want a linear signal, notice there is an IF stage
after the summing from that second conversion stage, and by doing it
digitally they'd have a digital signal, or be forced
to convert back to analog.
Maybe they didn't want to A/D stages?
Michael VE2BVW