On measurements of spurious components of heterodyne signal in radiometric receivers

Abstract

With a heterodyne frequency conversion, a significant contribution to the intrinsic noise of the radiometric receiver is made by a heterodyne. The spectral components generated by the heterodyne will be present in the processed signal at the output of the radiometric receiver and may manifest themselves when analyzing the received signal in spectral lines when high frequency resolution is required for processing. The purpose of the work is to analyze various types of modulation of the heterodyne signal, including modulation with an arbitrary phase shift between the components in the lower and upper side bands of the heterodyne signal. In this article, the methods of frequency transfer used in determining the spectral composition of the signal received by a radiometric receiver are considered. For heterodyne frequency conversion, in addition to the classical types of parasitic modulation of the heterodyne signal described in the literature – amplitude, phase (frequency) and single-band modulation, modulation with an arbitrary phase shift between the components in the lower and upper side bands of the heterodyne signal is considered. It is shown that with a small deviation of the frequencies of the modulating signal, ambiguity is possible in determining the level of components when using signal analyzers to measure the characteristics of heterodynes of radiometric receivers. The results of the analysis performed in the article can be used in the design of heterodynes with multiple output frequencies, taking into account the spectral comtent of the synthesized signal. The study was carried out at the expense of the grant of the Russian Science Foundation No. 22-19-00063 dated 13.05.2022. https://rscf.ru/project/22-19-00063.