Hi, it's tear down time again. Today we got a real sexy bit of Kit This is a Marone Instruments 2023 1.2 GHz Signal Generator Oh I Love it. This one's going to be fun. Lots of porn in here.

Let's check it out and you should know the name Marone yes the famous man himself and that led to a whole bunch of companies uh, including a spin-off Marone Instruments and interestingly I used to work back in the day at GC Marone Go figure. Anyway, uh, they um, used to make some really topend, highly reputable um RF uh. signal sources, generators, all sorts of test gear like that so very famous names I Expect a whole bunch of topend very well-designed Hardware in here, made in England Beauty the Old Dart Ripper and uh, they were sold sadly to Um IFR Systems I Think back in the late '90s or thereabouts, and in the early 2000 sold to a company called Aeroflex. Huh? Go figure.

And apparently they still sell this. You can still buy the 2023a looks exactly the same. It's probably got a few little upgrades inside, but you can still buy the same instrument today. more than I Don't know.

At least 15 years later. Fantastic. Think we're going to enjoy this one. Let's check it out.

Oh yeah, you can smell it. m Top End Hardware and I thought I'd just show you it. uh, powered on first because look at this beautiful uh, back lit dot matrix display I'm not sure how well it's going to show up on video, but it's really bright. Really fantastic display.

almost like a vacuum fluorescent. uh display keypad interface external modulation input over here 9 khz to 1 2 gig uh frequency range all up and it's got uh, the low frequency modulation output and the RF output of course which is an end connector but I've got an end to BNC uh on there. and of course it's got to have a knob. Beautiful! And check this out.

If we hit the carrier frequency button here, we can actually adjust this thing in 1 Hertz steps from 9 khz all the way up to 1.2 GHz 1 Herz steps. Got to be kidding me. So let's go up to a GHz there there it is 1 GHz and we can still go up in 1 Herz steps. Beautiful! It's got two different types of modulation as well.

you can which you can actually uh mix together as well as with the external modulation input over here and it really is quite a versatile. RF Signal generator I Love it! and the RF output can go anywhere from + 13 dbm to minus 137 DB Beautiful! And with this puppy of course we can can check the bandwidth of our Agilant Infin Vision 3000x series scope here 500 MHz bandwidth scope. Let's check it out. I've got a 10 MHz uh signal I'm feeding in now at about half a volt.

um RMS So uh, let's try and find the Uh Minus 3db uh frequency of this thing. You'd expect it to be 500 MHz cuz that's its quoted bandwidth so expect it to drop to about 350 MTS or minus 3db 707 of 500 Vols at 500 MHz Let's give that a go. Let's up the frequency directly to 500 MHz There it is and check it out. It's only 400 odd molt so it actually does better than that.

So we're going to have to um up the frequency here and uh, see what happens. So I'm going to uh up it in 1 MHz steps until 450 or 453 or thereabouts. there it is and that's 637. Mahz beautiful and just as a little heads up, Adelin going to actually upgrade this scope for me to the one the brand new 1 GHz um option.

so it's going back to Melbourne I'm going to be flying down there in the coming months and we'll see, hopefully see this puppy being upgraded to 1 GHz So stay tuned for that one. All right I Know you're curious to see it. Let's wind the wick up even further. Let's go.

Can it display our 1 GHz signal? It certainly can. Can it go to 1.2 Oh yeah, but now we're really right down in the noise. but interestingly, the hardware frequency counter is still spot on. And on the back here we've got, uh, there's a sticker that says no options fitted Bummer.

So this thing comes with uh, various options. Uh, one of the real good ones is the um, really, uh, High stability Ility temperature oven uh controlled uh oscillator so I don't have that? What a bummer, but doesn't matter I've got those in my lab anyway and check it out. Made in England How often do you see that the Old Dart Brilliant. And of course it can be controlled by the Rs232 or I E and it's got a standard I Mains input connector.

It's got various other uh DC inputs and a um RF uh output on the back optional which I haven't got or DC Supply if you uh, want to use it in some sort of remote location or something like that. but that's about all you got on the back. Now it's time to crack this thing open and that came open uh, pretty easily. Exactly as you'd expect.

Instrument of this type too, with the Uh case just sliding off the back like that. after a few screws and check out what's up here. There's a loose bit of there's a bit of paper. Let's check it out.

I wonder what it is? Unbelievable. It's uh, maybe somebody's serviced it or done something. What is it? It's a data sheet, different transistor. What the? why on Earth is that stuck inside this thing? Nothing on the back.

That's bizarre. And as for the unit itself, this is pretty much uh, the construction I Expected. The power supply is huge. It takes up almost the full uh length and the full height of the unit.

so that's massive. I'm a bit surprised at the uh size of that power supply. I Guess they're going for ultra high reliability I guess uh. one big uh digital processor uh board on the top.

It's got the main frequency Crystal Here we'll take a look at and you know, coax or two going around. but all of the RF magic is contained in a can on the bottom there. presumably exactly what I expected. And let's take a look in the power supply section and it's not, uh, really, as big as I thought.

But um, here's the main board here. and but they've also got the uh backlight inverter in here as well and they're basically just using it as a big shielded cage. Pretty much there's a bit of wasted, uh, space over here, but apart from that, that's pretty much what they're doing is just, uh, shielding this sucker. But they've also gone to a lot of trouble on the finer points of the engineering in here, so let's take a look at it.

now. these power devices attached to the side of the case. They're using the side of the case as a heat sink. They gone to the trouble to do a custom folded aluminium bracket there massive amount and there's a second secondary uh, metal, uh, black bracket behind here as well.

and uh, they've used some very professional looking uh clamping mechanism full of devices all individually screwed. they've got some uh, seal pad material behind there. very nice. There's a couple of linear linear uh voltage Regulators on there, plus a couple of switching uh components here and over here as well.

and they've just gone to a lot of trouble to actually uh, heat SN those very professionally on the side of the case I like it and the Transformer here. As you'd expect, it's uh, professionally, uh, mu metal? uh, wrap there just to try and uh, keep the leakage From that down. they got a another heat sink uh, heat sink device over here and they've got um, four, uh output filter caps here because probably for redundancy and stuff like that, they're not just relying on one big one. They got either two or four, uh, separate ones or possibly sub due to the massive inductors in here.

Probably some extra, uh, low frequency filtering as well. and the main capacitors have been gunked down so they don't vibrate. Unfortunately, this little, uh, vertical risen board here could actually, uh, vibrate a little bit. but look, they've gone to the effort to put the plastic spacers on a good lot of the high powerered resistors and diodes on this board.

I Really like that. No surprises though. the power supply is actually made in Taiwan by a third party. Ah well, you can't have everything, but that's fairly typical of these devices, but they've put a lot of effort into this.

Supply And here's the power switch on the front panel there and they've gone to quite a bit of effort to actually make this uh, shielded and the shielding is connected down there properly crimped and properly uh, locked in in place with a Um Shaker prooof nut and uh, it's really quite nice just to Shield the mains wiring going from the back to the front I Really like that and they've got more grounding on the heat sink plate here which goes into here and also the Earth they've got that uh going down to the plate down the bottom once again um also with a Uh Shake proof nut and professionally crimped and there's the other end of the Main's cable. once again, the shield for that is also connected at this end as well. And check out the rubber boot. they've got uh, complet like a heat shrink uh, rubber boot going over the I power connector.

Brilliant. And this device down here that looks for to me for all the world like one of those uh, temperature, uh, cutout things So maybe if the temperature of this plate gets too high, it's just going to cut out the Main's input. Beautiful! I Don't think I've ever seen that on a bit of T gear like this. And one thing you'll note on the back of the case here, they've got this uh, metal, uh, stuck on metal braid like this to uh get good RF uh screening between uh this and the Uh back and well and the Uh top the outer cover of the unit.

Nice attention to detail. They're really serious about uh uh, keeping things out, keeping RF out of this and keeping it in. And there's the LCD backlight uh switching board nothing really, uh, exciting going on there, but uh, they've put it inside this the same case as the switching power supply to keep to uh Shield it from the rest of the circuitry great and the power supply output wire in here. They got a couple of Ferite beads on there for RFI and those beads there are actually matched with these ones on the input to the board down there.

Check it out and there's a nice uh standard flat Flex uh rainbow ribbon cable there go from the digital board uh to actually penetrate. They use a D9 connector sorry, a D25 connector here to penetrate uh down through into the RF uh section of the board, another rainbow ribbon cable going to the front panel here for all the Uh switches, and there's another rainbow Cable in the back of this board which actually uh connects everything from one side this board over here, once again, through to the front panel board and construct of the main ball is fairly typical of the era. We've got Uh Plcc packages here for various Uh devices and uh, the rest of them are just standard so packages so you know we're talking 95 96 vintage here. They've got one Dip 40 package up the top here, but apart from that, um, it's you know, they've used all SMD electrolytic uh caps all around here.

totally almost totally. Um SMD design I Like it, but they've got a socket at Eom of course. Um, still fairly typical of the day cuz they're using a micro Uh processor instead of a micr controller which has flash firmware. They've got good oldfashioned Eom.

Love it. And of course, there's the obligatory uh, Bdge wires around here. green mod wires maybe to try and match in with the green solder mask on the PCB perhaps, but they're uh, near some Hc's There's a lot of 74 um HC series, uh TTL stuff on here. and we've got an analog devices a DSP 2100 series uh, microcontroller SL DSP It's optimized essentially a microcontroller optimized for DSP uh type work.

25 mips or thereabouts. Nothing. Uh Earth shattering by by today's standards, but that would have been a relatively uh Powerful Beast back in 1995. There it is 41st Week 95.

So that dates this board uh to uh, very much towards the end of 95 possibly. uh, early 96 6 manufacturer and we've got a Highq brand. very popular. uh for the age TCO 768 10 MHz reference oscillator Now this is the Uh temperature compensated oscillator.

It's not the um uh extra option uh, oven stabilized uh oscillator you got to pay I don't know a th000 or a couple of grand more for that option. And look at what we have here: an Intel ADC 188 Uh processor and we've got the Eom to go along with it. so they've clearly uh split the Uh function processing functionality between the Intel processor and between the uh uh, Analog Devices DSP we saw before. we've got another uh atmail um Eom device up here.

We' got some SRAM and uh, this device over here is an NEC uh, 7, uh 7210 uh Gpib controller and that's about all she wrote for the Uh processing part of this thing and this: Texas Instruments Tl1 16c 452 It's a Tronics Uh printer port interface and duel uart as well. so it's one of those um, sort of. you know, all-in-one LSI solutions for Uh, Centronics and Seral back in the days of the IBM PC and here we've got an 87537 uh dual 12-bit deck and support circuitry with those caps up here and stuff like that and it's obviously part of the modulation uh capability because the external modulation inputs are up here like this and uh, so obviously um, that's part of um I'm not sure if it's all of the modulation capability, but it's least the high level modulation capability of the board. And we've got some power supply stuff around here and we've got an Ad 586 that's a 5vt Precision uh reference right there.

and that's probably about all there. is to the main control board. And if you notice the front panel end connector down in there, it doesn't have a shielded coax at all. Instead, it's a proper metal tubing.

There might be a coax inside that metal tubing, but they've really gone to town. They're not just relying on the braid of the Uh of the coax itself, they're they're really making sure and using that as a full metal tube and that goes all. Runs all the way over to the other side here. and here's just another view of that Uh tube in going from the end connector on the front panel there all the way across down into the RF section and check out the RF section.

There's an awful lot of screws and stuff on this thing. Whoa. This could take some effort. Uh-oh This module contains Burum Oxide components refer to Handbook Screw the Handbook.

Well, it seems like I've uh, taken off possibly the wrong side because there's a um, this is all d cast um aluminium here and uh so all the screws on the bottom obviously hold in the board on that side. All these Center screws, they're all mold. It looks like they're all molded into that diecast. but there is this top aluminium plate with all these screws so maybe it's a jeel side.

uh. access board this plate here. um I expect if I take off all these uh screws we should get access to at least some circuitry under here with the bulk of it being accessible on the other side. Oh yeah, smell it.

RF porn. It just isn't. Aside here: look at the uh, this whole diecast plate here. they've actually built in um, the standoffs for the top PCB into that here and here so that you know that's lot of system engineering which goes in there to ensure that you know that this whole thing is assembled and constructed.

Um, you know, so that the mechanical people who design this, talk to the PCB people who are laying out the board, talk to the system Engineers who are, uh, actually, uh, laying out? Um, you know, designing the architecture of the thing and oh, it's just a lot of work. But Tada Here we have RF Magic. One of the first things you'll know notice is that all this circuitry is embedded in the diecast can here and it's surrounded by this, um, what looks like a um, like a rubber um seal against the top plate. But if we take a look at that, so let's actually probe what that stuff which looks like rubber down there and it's not, it's It's completely conductive and there's no surprises really.

This construction. You've seen it before in my uh, tear down of the uh tectronics um mixed domain Spectrum analyzer scope and it's very typical of Um RF system design like this is very modular. They're actually broken down into modules and you can physically see them and you can actually see the Uh controlled impedance uh, traces and check out the heavy number of bolts they've got tying down the board in each section. It's absolutely incredible, and if you look closely, you can see the penetrators going through to the Uh bottom module down in here.

So um, these penetrators are all the way along. They they're tapping points off, they're either injecting stuff in or they're tapping stuff out down to the bottom. uh RF section of this board I Love it. It's brilliant.

And what we've got here is clearly the output board because if you look down in there, there's the uh that RF tubeing going into the end connector on the front panel and it goes into a Pickering um RF relay here. That thing wouldn't be cheap. Let me tell you, it might be 100 bucks or something like that wouldn't surprise me at all. Um, so there's obviously some Power Protection uh circuitry in there which trips the relay or something like that.

Now what I've done here is I've flipped the board around so that the output is over here to match the system block diagram. and if we show the system block diagram on top of this, it might actually, uh, make some sense. Here's the output: um, uh, reverse polarity protection here. Um, we've probably got the step attenuator here.

We've probably got the pulse modulator here coming through one of the penetrators there, the input to the pulse modulator, and the input to the Uh step attenuator perhaps. and then going along further, we might have the uh Bfo, we might the two uh, bfo, uh, switching sections with the input. The Bfo is actually probably on the bottom uh board down in there, but they're just the switch sections for it. And then over here, we've probably got the level uh modu and probably the Am modulation too, so you can see how that's probably making sense.

Now based on the block diagram, and that's probably how they design this thing. You start off with a high Lev block diagram. you go into little building blocks and then you're going to lay out your board pretty much exactly the same way that you see it and you can Shield the individual sections because you see the shield actually comes down in between here with just a little penetrator down there for the Uh for the trace going across there. and just you know, it just all works based on the overall system diagram and on Second Glance that does actually match up perfectly cuz these are relays.

Look, they're on the underside of the board, but they're Rlf so it's relay F and they go along and they num it d E F uh G H E and it goes so forth right up to the Picker in relay, the Picker in output relay over here which is Rlm. There you go. So these are those switching boards so it matches up precisely. The individual blocks match up, uh, exactly to the system block diagram.

I Love it. and I love how you can just see the main signal flowing through that Center conductor. That center micro strip conductor there. this uh, would be a controlled impedance.

uh Board Of course it would have paid very close attention to that. It's probably not even, uh, Fr4 material. It would be, um, some sort of, uh, you know, a Teflon uh board or something like that. some sort of, uh, high frequency, uh, better controlled impedance board than Fr4.

but you can see the micr strip run, the signal runs straight through and then they've got these, uh, shielded bits and sort of like a penetrator here between each section. like that. so that just the micr strip Trace goes through. Brilliant.

Now, this part here is rather tricky. You I can't get a socket down in there to actually undo those screws. so you've got to actually shift. There's a couple of screws on the side here.

you've got to loosen them and the whole thing actually just slides out a little bit and comes out more into that open. Notch Well, I don't know why you just didn't put the huge notch in there. Anyway, that's a bit tricky. A Here we go.

This is going to be good, bloody hell of a lot of screws on there. Someone was really fond of these long black screws which presumably go down into the um uh, diecast up walls to separate all the modules. Here we go Cy Check it out. Beautiful! Oh I Love it there it is.

Warning: Burum under that RF transistor by the looks of it there. So there you go. That's about all they've got in here in terms of buril and they marked it on the silk screen. Brilliant and once again, no surprise.

Typical RF Uh layout. It's all modularized and they've uh, got this Um alloy. um uh Shield inside that's not part of the diecast I can actually, uh, lift that um out if I wanted to. it's a just.

it's one big uh board. It's uh, one big PC be. But with that shielded Um parts and they've even gone to the trouble to Shield inside the shield. Crazy.

But there you go. That's the effort they've gone to. There's a big um uh tag down here to connect to the Um upper plate. As if all the screw holes and everything else wasn't enough, they had to actually attach it at that point.

uh, down there as well. and no doubt, just like the board we saw on the upper side. If you got out the rest of the the block diagram and looked at the rest of the modules that we have left, you'd probably find that each one of these mapped to an individual part of that system block diagram. And interestingly, here's the penetrators along the top here.

and they're just uh, rainbow ribbon cable down to the1 in Um header down there. And these penetrators obviously are like a DC signals. They're not RF signals, they're just DC control voltages or low frequency uh modulation signals or something like that. so they don't have to go through um, like a coax or anything like that happily.

Um, do it using ribbon cable. Now this section here goes through these penetrators into the Um Am modulation top uh, far end part of the board and there's a deck here, so that obviously contains the Um Uh, the RF level deck and the Am deck as well. Inside this section, the harmonic Filters: They're probably over on this board over here and this board with the worn in burum uh compound. These are probably the harmonic Uh filters in this section of the board and you can see those on this system block diagram.

and one of these in here is probably the Uh top Octave Uh processor or something like that. Maybe the Uh local Uh oscillator? the voltage controlled oscillator perhaps. or maybe that's Um in one of these sections over here. but I'm sure if you put a bit of thought into it and studied the block diagram, you could easily figure out which module is which.

And down here we have a Zarlink sp 8402 and that's a a very low phase noise divide by N device. So there's our divide by n' part of the block diagram and it probably contains the top octave processor in there as well. And here's another Zarlink device. It's the SP 8400 as opposed to the 8402 we saw before.

and uh, that is once again, a very low phase noise device device. And it's the fractional N synthesizer. So that's the fractional N synthesizer block that we saw in our system block diagram. Easy.

And this section in here. Well, we've got a Phillips um, PM 7543 Dack So that's probably um, this part of the system. uh, block diagram with the attenuation modu with the modulation converter and the step attenuator and stuff like that. and I've taken the shield off those cans and that's probably the Vco over here, perhaps.

So that is in that part of the overall system. So there you go. That's a rough uh, functional block breakdown of this device. I Love it.

And once again, it clearly follows the system functional block diagram. It's really neat, and when you're designing these, it just really helps to modularize these and keep them separate like this. Not only does it make uh, sense from a shielding uh, point of view and a layout board point of view and all that sort of stuff, but um, you really it. It just makes uh, sense from a system debugging point of view testing all that sort of stuff.

But really they've uh, done well to get all this uh RF magic onto the one board. There's a lot of effort there. each individual subsection would have have to been individually, uh, tested and characterized and stuff like that before they did the final layout and up here at says it's only issue two of the board, although there's another box next to it which says issue eight in a pen. So maybe they've gone through a few revisions.

So I hope you enjoyed that. A tear down on the Marone 2023 Lots of RF magic in there I Love it. Brilliant. And if you like the video, don't forget to give it a thumbs up if you comment.

if you got any uh comments on what you think parts of these uh circuitry do I haven't gone through it in detail at all, then by all means leave it in the comments or jump on the Eev blog forum and talk about it. This has been a rather interesting bit of Kit I'll catch you next time.