1-10GHz counter

[Electronics4you]

Hi All


Is it possible to make a 1-10GHz counter without using a computer?

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[zevon8]

Yes, it is possible, but the circuit difficulties are great. PCB layout, component choices, RF knowledge etc, would make this a daunting task.

If you are looking for an instrument for your work bench, you may want to check EBay for something used. Decent counters of quality manufacture can be had for under 200 dollars US. Some may be big, and older, but likely cost 5 times as much when new.

 

[checkmate]

Anything above 50MHz needs a professionally done PCB, and it gets worse as frequency goes up. Commercial counters targeted for RF scanning can probably bring you up to a few GHz. Going up to 10GHz may be a bit pushing it too far.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

The answers so far are perhaps a little misleading?, you don't normally 'make' a 10GHz counter - you use a prescaler to reduce the frequency down to usable levels. A divide by 10 brings it down to 1GHz, another brings it down to 100MHz, which is still too high for standard chips. So a third would bring it down to 10MHz - you simply switch the decimal point on your display accordingly.

However! - finding the extremely high frequency dividers required is likely to be difficult?, most of them are no longer manufactured. Also the higher frequency ones often didn't divide by ten, so it requires a little more computation.

I don't seen any relevence to the computer question?, it's not a job a computer could do!.

 

[Electronics4you]

LIDAR

The police now use a new type of LIDAR, which measures the time for each laserpulse. How can does the LIDAR do this, when the laserpulses travels at the speed of light?

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