Doogie's Blog

MOSFET Basics

I've seen a lot of questions recently on various forums involving MOSFET projects not working as expected.
I've been meaning to write up a quick summary of how to use them for simple microcontroller projects, so I figured this was a good time to do it.

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F-Script Injection in Mavericks

I continue to use F-Script occasionally to investigate how programs work internally. The framework itself has been updated to handle the changes in OS X Mavericks. However, the developer tools included with Xcode 5 swap out the gdb debugger for lldb, breaking the injection script again. After playing around with the automator action some more, here's what I came up with that works on Mavericks.

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Scalar Network Analysis with a Spectrum Analyzer

A spectrum analyzer is a phenomenally useful piece of test equipment when working on RF circuitry. While used, several generation old spectrum analyzers can be found fairly reasonably priced, network analyzers are usually out of reach for a home lab. However, with a little bit of additional equipment some of the measurements that would normally require a network analyzer can be done on a spectrum analyzer.

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Mystery YIG Oscillator

For a project I am currently working on (to be detailed shortly), I needed an oscillator capable of covering 8 to 12 GHz. There are quite a few of the miniature Stellex units on eBay, but they generally don't go much past 10 GHz. There are also tons of Avantek modules, in their standard round format, but a lot of them are custom part numbers with no specifications known. Since this particular project wasn't very sensitive to any of the parameters, I waited for a cheap one to show up with the right range and went for it. With a little investigating, it wasn't very difficult to determine the approximate specs for the module I purchased.

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