Toshiba RF Receiver for HDTVPresentation 11: 02/10/2005

Team:Josue Caballero, Brett DiCio, Daniel Hooper,

Efosa Ojomo, George Sewell

Last week

• Finished buying equipment for Pringles Can Antenna (PCA) and Receiving Antenna

• Built the receiving antenna

• Might not build the PCA

• Found out information on getting reimbursed (Susan Adams)

• Electrical Supply Store

Building the Antenna…

• 24cm of plastic faucet tubing from Home Depot

• 13.5cm of 12guage copper wire

• Roughly 20cm of 20guage copper wirean RF adapter (pl259 to bnc)

• A coax pl-259 connector

Building the Antenna contd…

• Soldered the raw 12gauge wire to the pl-259 connector

• Pulled the 20gauge wire through the bottom and soldered it to the end of the 12 gauge wire

• Pulled the 20gauge out through the top hole and made 4 turns for UHF antenna and 18 turns for VHF

Testing

• No increase in UHF signal strength of reception

• Increase in VHF signal strength of reception

• Antenna was longer than Toshiba’s

• Conclusion: The design was not worth it based on results

Cross section of Antenna

Factory Antenna

• Tested factory antenna at 180 degrees

• Lab notebook has vertical and horizontal testing

• Factory antenna is about 20dBuV stronger

• Don’t know what contributes to this

Another consideration

• Finding an antenna with the required bandwidth and size is proving difficult

• Considering an RF transformer instead of an antenna– Prof. Cook & Doc. Watai both recommend

• Have halted antenna design endeavors and have begun researching RF transformers

RF Transformers

• Devices that transfer energy from one circuit to another by electromagnetic induction

• Very short range

• Used for impedance matching to achieve maximum power transfer

• Used to suppress undesired signal reflection

RF transformer

Next week

• Meet with Professor Cook tomorrow

• Research more on RF transformers

• Possibly build an RF transformer

• Test the RF transformer (dependent)

References

• http://www.minicircuits.com/appnote/howxfmerwork.pdf#search='rf%20transformers

• Harris Electric Supply CO Inc