Check the Radio Amateur's Handbook.  There is a little of everything in
there.  And most of the projects
 and equipment in there was designed and built by amateur radio
operators.  And if you know anything about
 amateur radio operators, they want to get the most bang from their
buck.  Which means they use more
 ingenuity than money, and design needed equipment to do a job well, but
not necessarily fancy.  And they
 do it on the cheap.  Cheap meaning inexpensive, not low quality.

 Regards (73),=20

 Jim (KA9QHR)

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [EE] Build a spectrum analyzer
> From: Herbert Graf <hkgraf@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, June 28, 2011 10:00 am
> To: "Microcontroller list - Public." <piclist@mit.edu>
>=20
>=20
> So, in my huge amounts of free time I've been thinking that the one area
> of electronics I don't really have much experience is radio.
>=20
> I've been experimenting and having some fun, but I've convinced myself
> that something that might turn out to be a really fun and educational
> adventure is building a spectrum analyzer.
>=20
> There's not of google links out there to half finished or ancient
> projects.=20
>=20
> I'm not looking at creating laboratory grade equipment, just something
> that'll help me see that the circuits I'm building are actually doing.
>=20
> So, any suggestions?
>=20
> I'm not to concerned about the interface or display, that's the kind of
> stuff I've done before so I'd probably just take the easy way out and
> use a PC initially.
>=20
> My main area of concern is the actual RF stuff.
>=20
> I'd like the analyzer to at least cover up to about 1GHz (the 2.4GHz
> band would be nice (and very useful in the future) but I feel I might be
> overreaching there).
>=20
> Alot of projects use the tuners in VCRs for the RF front end. Any
> recommendations on something that might work well?
>=20
> Ideally if I could get a tuner to do most of the dirty work (something
> like feed it a voltage to select which frequency to tune, and output an
> RSSI signal to indicate signal strength) that would be a great way to
> start.=20
>=20
> Any suggestions? Anybody do something similar?
>=20
> Thanks for your ideas!
>=20
> TTYL
>=20
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