Thanks Dave -- great post. I think I need to take the tiny little ball of
mixer/filter I have, spread it out a bit, terminate all the ports properly,
and start making some measurements before connecting the IF filter, etc. back
up a piece at a time!

Thanks for the advice Tim; much appreciated!

"A" wrote in message
.com...
I don't have anything like the fancy gear you have and my criteria are more
or less "if you can hear it and its OK with you, then its fine" (for
receivers anyway).

I'm in a very fortuitous position, being somewhat a novice at RF design
personally, but working at a company that's been doing it for years so I have
access to a fair amount of nice test equipment. :-) Sometimes it's a little
weird, though -- until a couple of years ago now we had network analyzers
going to 6GHz but no scope better than 100MHz!

I think projects like the TAPR VNA (http://www.tapr.org/kits_vna.html -- now
sold by Ten-Tec) are great, although it's unfortunate that it tops out at
100MHz, as in many cases one can "get by" with a lot less down at HF or even
2m than those trying to homebrew 70cm or higher gear. Even getting, say, 1GHz
spectrum analyzers with tracking generators is not at all cheap (meaning,
within most hobbyist's budgets, which I'd say is something $1k or less for
such a device) -- there's been discussion on and off for ages on how such a
tool would sell like hotcakes, given how much it would benefit homebrewers and
commercial users. I kick around the idea of trying to build something like
that myself, but I do already have enough experience to know that there's a
very large investment in time between "design looks good on paper" and "design
actually works" if you're shooting for decent dynamic ranges and resolution
bandwidths.

Thanks for your input,
---Joel