The Mission
Satellite links now reach well into Ka-band and beyond, and the ground equipment that talks to them has to be characterized across that whole span. SATCOM and ground-station test work covers uplink and downlink chains, frequency converters, and modem front ends. The common thread is the need for a clean, stable carrier that can stand in for a local oscillator or an uplink signal without adding noise of its own.
The Challenge
Phase noise is the quiet enemy of any wideband or high-order-modulation link. A noisy source masks the very impairments you are trying to measure and inflates error-vector magnitude on the bench. The source also has to reach the upper bands, since Ka-band and millimeter-wave converters cannot be tested with a generator that stops at 20 GHz. Coverage and spectral purity have to arrive together.
Recommended Berkeley Nucleonics Solutions
The Model 870A is the natural anchor here, covering 100 kHz to 54 GHz with deep phase noise (down to -100 dBc/Hz at 10 Hz offset with the LN+ option) and single or multi-channel configurations. It reaches the full Ka-band span and above in one instrument.
The Model 871 extends phase-coherent coverage to 51 GHz with fast switching, a good fit when uplink and downlink need to stay locked together. For sources up to 40 GHz, the Model 865B is a compact, low-phase-noise bench generator (-130 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz, 1 GHz carrier) well suited to converter and LO substitution. Where lower-band uplink chains and IF sections dominate, the Model 845 covers 100 kHz to 26.5 GHz with full modulation and a portable, battery-capable form factor for field ground-station work.
Why It Works
Low phase noise keeps the source from contaminating the measurement, so the impairments you read belong to the device under test, not the generator. Reaching 54 GHz in a single box means one instrument spans IF through millimeter-wave instead of forcing a chain of converters into the test setup. And because several of these models share a coherent multi-channel design, a ground-station bench can drive uplink and downlink paths from one synchronized source.
Getting Started
Berkeley Nucleonics applications engineers help match the right source, channel count, and options to your test plan. Tell us your frequency span, switching budget, and channel needs, and we will recommend a configuration and arrange a demo.
Contact info@berkeleynucleonics.com or call 800-234-7858. Browse the full family on the RF & Microwave Signal Generators documentation page.