ELEC 432

In the Lab II: Testing

The main purpose of this week's exercise is to provide an opportunity to practice surface mount assembly skills which you will need in subsequent exercises and for your design project. However, in the process of doing this, we've created a (hopefully) working circuit, so we might as well get some good out of it. The first thing to do is a functional test: i.e. does it work? Except for the modifications for single supply operation, these circuits are straight out of 241, so fire up the scope and function generator and verify that it does what it is supposed to do.

Once the circuit is verified as operational, we can make some quantitative measurements. Start by measuring and plotting the frequency response. In Exercise 1 we measured the noise and distortion of the MFJ-1020C preamp. Repeat these measurements for your amplifier and compare the results with those of Exercise 1. Which amplifier is better?

To practice your unsoldering skills, reconfigure your circuit to use the other amplifier, repeat the measurements, and compare the two halves.


Question 1:

 Is the measured performance of your amplifier consistent with what your would expect from the op-amp's specifications? If not, suggest possible reasons for any discrepancies.

Question 2:

 Based on your observations in this Exercise, how would you rate op-amps as RF design components?