A little while ago I purchased a Rigol DSA1030A-TG and have been happly using it for various RF tasks above 100 MHz. Yesterday, I pulled some IF filters from a friend's radio that are suspected of being bad. No problem, their freq of 455 kHz is well withing the specs of my SA right?
Hooking up the TG to the input (with suitable Rs) etc, I was surprised to see no signal. Is the filter that bad? No, there is nothing coming out of the TG. I finally put the SA into zero-span mode and checked the output with a scope, no signal!
A close reading of the spec for this unit says the Tracking Generator is "10M-3G, 9k-settable". I'm not sure what that last part is supposed to mean, but the first is pretty clear, it only works from 10M up, not 9k.
Looking at the output of the TG, its amplitute drops off below 100M, it stops being a sin wave below 25M, at 10M its a square wave and below that it just goes away. There are some small glitches at the programmed freq, but they are pretty fast spikes and ringing, not just a low freq signal filtered by too small caps.
Even more frustrating is that the "lower end" DSA815 is speced to go down to 100 kHz.
Don
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