Re: Tesla coil tuner (grid-dip meter)

• To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
• Subject: Re: Tesla coil tuner (grid-dip meter)
• From: W Y Liu <eenwyl-at-sun.leeds.ac.uk> (by way of Terry Fritz <twf-at-verinet-dot-com>)
• Date: Fri, 05 Feb 1999 21:26:18 -0700
• Approved: twf-at-verinet-dot-com

> Wouldn't it be nice to use a microcontroller (PIC) to control the tuning and
> Q (damping) of a filter/oscillator? By pinging the circuit with a step, and
> timing the ring period, the Q could possibly be adjusted for very high
> (10,000?) values. It would be very nice for the following applications:
> 
> * Spectrum-analyzer type oscilloscope probe
> * Clean RF sine oscillator, & sweep generator
> * Antenna and return loss measurements (grid-dip meter)
> 
> The single-chip controller PIC might even count frequencies (under 50MHz
> without extra prescaler) and send RS-232 data to a computer for detailed
> analysis & display. I would hope the RF spectrum from 1MHz to 1GHz could be
> covered with 7 transistor oscillator circuits, each covering a 3:1 frequency
> band.
> 
I can offer you one more option in this respect. If your instruments (ie.
spectrum-analyzer & waveform generator) are HP's products, you can make use 
HP's vee software without using a microcontroller. The software can 
communicate with the HP's instruments through  the HPIB card and you can do 
detailed analysis as well. I have no comments for other issues, except that
, when you talk about the "clever algorithm" that can tune the varactor
nonlinearity, I would like to know more (if you can offer any details).

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