Chameleonic Radio Technical Memo No. 10 A Candidate RF Architecture for a Multiband Public Safety Radio S.M. Shajedul Hasan and S.W. Ellingson September 28, 2006 Bradley Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University Blacksburg, VA 24061
A Candidate RF Architecture for a Multiband Public Safety Radio S.M. Shajedul Hasan, S.W. Ellingson September 28, 2006 Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Architecture 2 2.1 RF Downconverter............................ 2 2.2 RF Upconverter.............................. 5 3 Detailed Design for Receiver Section 5 Bradley Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, 302 Whittemore Hall, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Blacksburg VA 24061 USA. E-mail: ellingson@vt.edu 1
1 Introduction This report describes a candidate architecture for the radio frequency (RF) section of a multiband radio for public safety applications. This work is performed as part of the project A Low Cost All-Band All-Mode Radio for Public Safety, Grant 2005-IJ-CX-K018, from the National Institute of Justice of the U.S. Dept. of Justice. The architecture described here accommodates public safety frequencies ranging from 138 MHz to 894 MHz as described in [1]. Although frequencies greater than 894 MHz are also potentially of interest, the issue of how to tackle the remaining bands potentially of interest (i.e., PCS, 2.4 GHz, and 4.9 GHz) is not addressed in this report. The candidate architecture is presented in Section 2. Note that in this phase of the project, cost is not a consideration. Rather, the emphasis is proof of concept. However, to demonstrate the efficacy of this architecture, Section 3 presents a detailed component-level and printed circuit board design for a section of the receive chain. 2 Architecture The transceiver architecture proposed for this radio, described in [2] and shown in Figure 1, requires that the RF downconverter (RFDC) move a 40 MHz swath of spectrum from RF to an intermediate frequency (IF) centered at 78 MHz, where it is digitized. The RF upconverter (RFUC) is required to do the opposite. 2.1 RF Downconverter A block diagram of the proposed RFDC is shown in Figure 2. The first stage of the RFDC is a switched preselector, which routes the RF through one of three filter paths. The three bands provided by the preselector are 138 222 MHz, 450 512 MHz, and 764 894 MHz. The purpose of preselection is to improve dynamic range by isolating strong signals which are outside the band of interest. Following the preselector is an up-down frequency converter. The RF is mixed up to a first IF of 1250 MHz using a high-side local oscillator (LO). Here it is bandpassfiltered, and most of the selectivity occurs here. The resulting undesired sideband is 2638 3394 MHz, and is easily rejected since the desired bandpass is only about 40 MHz around 1250 MHz. The IF frequency of 1250 MHz was selected due to the availability of suitable surface mount filters. In this case, a Lark Engineering 1 MC Series filter is a candidate; specifically Part No. MC1250-60-3MM, which provides 60 MHz 3 db bandwidth, 3 db insertion loss, S 12 < 60 db across the image band, and S 12 < 40 db against the local oscillator (LO). 60 MHz bandwidth is appropriate 1 http://www.larkengineering.com 2
Figure 1: Proposed transceiver architecture (from [2]). so as to ensure that the central 40 MHz of interest remain spectrally relatively flat, and free of distortion induced by the filter band edges. A diplexer is used to absorb as much LO power as possible, so as to reduce reflection into the mixer and also to improve the rejection through the 1250 MHz IF strip. A local oscillator which tunes from 1388 MHz to 2144 MHz is required. The second frequency conversion moves the IF from 1250 MHz to 78 MHz. Again, a diplexer is employed to mitigate reflection into the mixer and to provide some additional suppression of the 1328 MHz LO. It is assumed that an antialiasing filter and A/D driver appropriate to the A/D component and sample rate are used, but these are not considered here. This design yields a cascade gain, input third-order intercept (IP 3 ), and noise figure of +38.3 db, 13.5 dbm, and 9.1 db, respectively. The noise figure corresponds to a sensitivity of 115.3 dbm with respect to the TIA-603 criterion of 12 db SINAD with 20 db quieting [3]. The TIA-603 standard is 116 dbm, thus this design is already quite close to meeting this specification. The ultimate design will probably incorporate some additional low-noise gain following the preselector, which is certain to improve the sensitivity significantly. 3
)*( ) 5 1), %&' : 9; 99 <)=, %&' " '&>? %&' : 9 9 <)=, %&'9 9 @ Figure 2: Block diagram of the RFDC. 4
2.2 RF Upconverter A block diagram of the proposed RFUC is shown in Figure 3. The architecture mirrors that of the RFDC so as to allow the use of common LOs. Thus, the first stage is an upconversion from 78 MHz to 1250 MHz, and the second stage is a downconversion from 1250 MHz to the desired RF. In lieu of a preselector, a single bandpass filter with a passband from 138 MHz to 894 MHz is used, and exists primarily to suppress spurious signals including the strong LO feedthrough above 1388 MHz. Additional rejection above 1 GHz is provided by the diplexer following the second mixer. This design yields a cascade gain and output (IP 3 ) of +49.2 db and +28.3 dbm respectively. Thus, a 30 dbm input provided by a digital IF section will result in a output of +19.2 dbm (approximately 100 mw), with good linearity. A power amplifier (PA) with 17.8 db gain is required to achieve 5 W output power; this is probably best implemented using separate PAs to cover different parts of the tuning range. This is probably not a limitation as it will be extremely difficult to develop an antenna which is sufficiently well-matched to handle 5 W across this tuning range. 3 Detailed Design for Receiver Section To provide some additional insight into the performance of this design, the RFDC shown in Figure 2, minus the preselector, is currently being constructed and evaluated. The detailed design is shown in Figure 4. Two options for the 78 MHz IF filter are shown: One using a single plug-in filter, and a second using discrete surface mount components. One or the other would be used, but not both. Figure 5 shows the top layer of the associated printed circuit board (PCB). The PCB is FR4, 6 in 3.45 in, and contains 4 layers: top (component side), ground, power, and bottom. The PCB was designed using the CadSoft 2 Eagle Layout Editor. The design files, including the schematic and a bill of materials, is available via the project web site [4]. References [1] S.W. Ellingson, Requirements for an Experimental Public Safety Multiband/Multimode Radio: Analog FM Modes, Technical Memo No. 8, July 27, 2006, http://www.ece.vt.edu/swe/chamrad/. [2] S. Ellingson and J. Reed, Multi-Band Multi-Mode Radio for Public Safety, International Wireless Communications Expo (IWCE), Las Vegas, NV, May 19, 2006. Available at http://www.ece.vt.edu/swe/chamrad/. 2 http://www.cadsoft.de 5
,-. '09 *+ #$%& -. '()* *+,-. /)(012 '()* 9 #$%& /-. '()*,-. '()* 9 Figure 3: Block diagram of the RFUC. 6
Figure 4: A possible implementation of the RFDC architecture shown in Figure 2, minus preselector. 7
Figure 5: Top (component) side of the PCB implementing the partial RFDC design shown in Figure 4. [3] Telecommunications Industry Association, TIA Standard: Land Mobile FM or PM Communications Equipment Measurement and Performance Standards, TIA-603-C, December 2004. [4] Project web site, http://www.ece.vt.edu/swe/chamrad/. 8