Design And Implementation Of X-Band Microwave Source Control System

In horn antenna measurement system, Radio Frequency (RF) signal which has stable frequency and adjustable power is needed to measure the characteristics of horn antenna at specific input. As the essential input devices of horn antenna measurement system, microwave source with stable and effective RF signal has important influence on production of qualified horn antenna.In order to cater the needs of X-band Microwave source system which is inexpensive, dedicated and easy to operate in horn antenna measurement field, A kind of X-band Microwave source is designed and realized based on embedded control technology, automatic testing technology, frequency synthesis technology and power attenuation technology in this paper, and the source has features of low-cost, small size, stable frequency and adjustable power. In addition, automatic monitoring software is developed to test the quality of X-band microwave source and reduce work intensity of testers, which has functions of user management, real-time monitoring, automatic testing, data query and report generation and printing.Firstly, according to the application background of X-band microwave source system, in-depth analysis of the design goals and functional requirements is accomplished in the paper, and a overall scheme is done on this base. The scheme not only analyses the requirements and selections of the frequency source module and the power attenuation module respectively, but also designs the function needs and communication protocols between the control module and automatic monitoring software. Then, the hardware and software designs of all functions in the control module such as friendly interaction, remote control are discussed in the paper. In regard to automatic monitoring software, many functions are realized by VISA instrument driver, multi-threading technology, data storage technology and ActiveX technology so that it can meet the testing needs of X-band microwave source device.Finally, a lot of experimental tests of X-band microwave source devices have been performed by using self-developed automatic monitoring test software. The results show that the design of X-band microwave source system in this paper has the advantages of low phase noise, low spurious, adjustable output power and easy to operate, which is applied to meet the actual needs. Currently, the X-band microwave source equipment developed by the plan have been put into production and preliminarily used in the horn antenna measurement systems.