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Low-noise Amplifier
A low-noise amplifier (LNA) is an electronic component that amplifies a very low-power signal without significantly degrading its signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Any electronic amplifier will increase the power of both the signal and the noise present at its input, but the amplifier will also introduce some additional noise. LNAs are designed to minimize that additional noise, by choosing special components, operating points, and circuit topologies. Minimizing additional noise must balance with other design goals such as power gain and impedance matching. LNAs are found in radio communications systems, Amateur Radio stations, medical instruments and electronic test equipment. A typical LNA may supply a power gain of 100 (20 decibels (dB)) while decreasing the SNR by less than a factor of two (a 3 dB noise figure (NF)). Although LNAs are primarily concerned with weak signals that are just above the noise floor, they must also consider the presence of larger signals tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Signal
A signal is both the process and the result of transmission of data over some media accomplished by embedding some variation. Signals are important in multiple subject fields including signal processing, information theory and biology. In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The '' IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing'' includes audio, video, speech, image, sonar, and radar as examples of signals. A signal may also be defined as observable change in a quantity over space or time (a time series), even if it does not carry information. In nature, signals can be actions done by an organism to alert other organisms, ranging from the release of plant chemicals to warn nearby plants of a predator, to sounds or motions made by animals to alert other animals of food. Signaling occurs in all organisms even at cellular leve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coaxial Cable
Coaxial cable, or coax (pronounced ), is a type of electrical cable consisting of an inner Electrical conductor, conductor surrounded by a concentric conducting Electromagnetic shielding, shield, with the two separated by a dielectric (Insulator (electricity), insulating material); many coaxial cables also have a protective outer sheath or jacket. The term ''coaxial'' refers to the inner conductor and the outer shield sharing a geometric axis. Coaxial cable is a type of transmission line, used to carry high-frequency Signal, electrical signals with low losses. It is used in such applications as telephone trunk lines, Internet access, broadband internet networking cables, high-speed computer bus (computing), data buses, cable television signals, and connecting Transmitter, radio transmitters and Radio receiver, receivers to their Antenna (radio), antennas. It differs from other shielded cables because the dimensions of the cable and connectors are controlled to give a precise, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vacuum Tube
A vacuum tube, electron tube, thermionic valve (British usage), or tube (North America) is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied. It takes the form of an evacuated tubular envelope of glass or sometimes metal containing electrodes connected to external connection pins. The type known as a thermionic tube or thermionic valve utilizes thermionic emission of electrons from a hot cathode for fundamental Electronics, electronic functions such as signal amplifier, amplification and current Rectifier, rectification. Non-thermionic types such as vacuum phototubes achieve electron emission through the photoelectric effect, and are used for such purposes as the detection of light and measurement of its intensity. In both types the electrons are accelerated from the cathode to the anode by the electric field in the tube. The first, and simplest, vacuum tube, the diode or Flem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Narrow-band
Narrowband signals are signals that occupy a narrow range of frequencies or that have a small fractional bandwidth. In the audio spectrum, ''narrowband sounds'' are sounds that occupy a narrow range of frequencies. In telephony, narrowband is usually considered to cover frequencies 300–3400 Hz, i.e. the voiceband. In radio communications, a narrowband channel is a channel in which the bandwidth of the message does not significantly exceed the channel's coherence bandwidth. In the study of wired channels, ''narrowband'' implies that the channel under consideration is sufficiently narrow that its frequency response can be considered flat. The message bandwidth will therefore be less than the coherence bandwidth of the channel. That is, no channel has perfectly flat fading, but the analysis of many aspects of wireless systems is greatly simplified if flat fading can be assumed. Two-way radio narrowband Two-Way Radio Narrowbanding refers to a U.S. Federal Communications Com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shot Noise
Shot noise or Poisson noise is a type of noise which can be modeled by a Poisson process. In electronics shot noise originates from the discrete nature of electric charge. Shot noise also occurs in photon counting in optical devices, where shot noise is associated with the particle nature of light. Origin In a statistical experiment such as tossing a fair coin and counting the occurrences of heads and tails, the numbers of heads and tails after many throws will differ by only a tiny percentage, while after only a few throws outcomes with a significant excess of heads over tails or vice versa are common; if an experiment with a few throws is repeated over and over, the outcomes will fluctuate a lot. From the law of large numbers, one can show that the relative fluctuations reduce as the reciprocal square root of the number of throws, a result valid for all statistical fluctuations, including shot noise. Shot noise exists because phenomena such as light and electric curren ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
High-electron-mobility Transistor
A high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT or HEM FET), also known as heterostructure FET (HFET) or modulation-doped FET (MODFET), is a field-effect transistor incorporating a junction between two materials with different band gaps (i.e. a heterojunction) as the channel instead of a doped region (as is generally the case for a MOSFET). A commonly used material combination is Gallium arsenide, GaAs with Aluminium gallium arsenide, AlGaAs, though there is wide variation, dependent on the application of the device. Devices incorporating more indium generally show better high-frequency performance, while in recent years, gallium nitride HEMTs have attracted attention due to their high-power performance. Like other FETs, HEMTs can be used in integrated circuits as digital on-off switches. FETs can also be used as amplifiers for large amounts of current using a small voltage as a control signal. Both of these uses are made possible by the FET’s unique current–voltage characteristic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Junction Field-Effect Transistor
The junction field-effect transistor (JFET) is one of the simplest types of field-effect transistor. JFETs are three-terminal semiconductor devices that can be used as electronically controlled switches or resistors, or to build amplifiers. Unlike bipolar junction transistors, JFETs are exclusively voltage-controlled in that they do not need a biasing current. Electric charge flows through a semiconducting channel between ''source'' and ''drain'' terminals. By applying a reverse bias voltage to a ''gate'' terminal, the channel is '' pinched'', so that the electric current is impeded or switched off completely. A JFET is usually conducting when there is zero voltage between its gate and source terminals. If a potential difference of the proper polarity is applied between its gate and source terminals, the JFET will be more resistive to current flow, which means less current would flow in the channel between the source and drain terminals. JFETs are sometimes referred to as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voltage Standing Wave Ratio
In radio engineering and telecommunications, standing wave ratio (SWR) is a measure of impedance matching of loads to the characteristic impedance of a transmission line or waveguide. Impedance mismatches result in standing waves along the transmission line, and SWR is defined as the ratio of the partial standing wave's amplitude at an antinode (maximum) to the amplitude at a node (minimum) along the line. Voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) (pronounced "vizwar" ) is the ratio of maximum to minimum voltage on a transmission line . For example, a VSWR of 1.2 means a peak voltage 1.2 times the minimum voltage along that line, if the line is at least one half wavelength long. A SWR can be also defined as the ratio of the maximum amplitude to minimum amplitude of the transmission line's currents, electric field strength, or the magnetic field strength. Neglecting transmission line loss, these ratios are identical. The power standing wave ratio (PSWR) is defined as the square ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compression Point
The compression point is a metric describing an aspect of electronic amplifiers. For example, the 1-dB compression point (sometimes notated as P1dB) is the output power of the amplifier (for the signal of interest) at which it differs from an ideal linear amplifier by more than 1 dB. So a larger 1-dB compression point means that the amplifier can produce larger outputs (for the same amount of distortion). It will often be quoted by manufacturers of amplifiers.. The compression point is sometimes used (interchangeably with the third-order intercept point In telecommunications, a third-order intercept point (IP3 or TOI) is a specific figure of merit associated with the more general third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3), which is a measure for weakly nonlinear systems and devices, for exa ...) to define the upper limit of the dynamic range of an amplifier. A rule of thumb that holds for many linear radio-frequency amplifiers is that the 1 dB compression point point ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gain (electronics)
In electronics, gain is a measure of the ability of a two-port circuit (often an amplifier) to increase the power or amplitude of a signal from the input to the output port by adding energy converted from some power supply to the signal. It is usually defined as the mean ratio of the signal amplitude or power at the output port to the amplitude or power at the input port. It is often expressed using the logarithmic decibel (dB) units ("dB gain"). A gain greater than one (greater than zero dB), that is, amplification, is the defining property of an active device or circuit, while a passive circuit will have a gain of less than one. The term ''gain'' alone is ambiguous, and can refer to the ratio of output to input voltage (''voltage gain''), current (''current gain'') or electric power (''power gain''). In the field of audio and general purpose amplifiers, especially operational amplifiers, the term usually refers to voltage gain, but in radio frequency amplifiers it usua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RF Front End
In a radio receiver circuit, the RF front end, short for ''radio frequency front end'', is a generic term for all the circuitry between a receiver's antenna input up to and including the mixer stage. It consists of all the components in the receiver that process the signal at the original incoming radio frequency (RF), before it is converted to a lower intermediate frequency (IF). In microwave and satellite receivers it is often called the low-noise block downconverter (LNB) and is often located at the antenna, so that the signal from the antenna can be transferred to the rest of the receiver at the more easily handled intermediate frequency. Superheterodyne receiver For most superheterodyne architectures, the RF front end consists of:Carr 200 ''The Technician's Radio Receiver Handbook''p. 37-39 * A band-pass filter (BPF) to reduce image response. This removes any signals at the image frequency, which would otherwise interfere with the desired signal. It also prevents ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
