Eric asked about use cases for frequecies >10GHz.
Well, here is mine! I am, among other things, a satellite DXer and interested in satellite TV reception.
In order to get fringe reception going and to maintain my dishes and equipment, I own not one, but two "Schwaiger SAT-Pr¨¹fgenerator SPG 101".
These small devices were used back in the analogue satellite receptions days to simply test if the LNB is working! The device emits a composite video test image composed of a simple grid at exactly 11.288 GHz.
If you could receive the test image with your analogue receiver, it meant that the LNB was OK and you had a fault somewhere else or misaligned dish.
With the TinySA Ultra I can now test if the SPG 101 iitself is working!
It seems, however, that the TinySA Ultra has some serious frequency deviations: instead of 11.288GHz, the signal is shown at 10.4139GHz. Not a big issue for me - I am happy to be able to "see" what is going on at all!
Anyway, I checked with a field meter, to make sure if the SPG 101 was not off:
The meter puts the centre frequency at 11.2815GHz, which seems close enough for me, considering the age of the SGS 101.
As a side note, I modified my second SGS 101 and added a composite video input. The IC used inside the device has actually the option to either generate a test pattern (as used by the SGS 101) or to upconvert a composite video signal. This allows me to broadcast composite video at 11GHz at a distance of around 1-2m.
So yes, it is great that the TinySA Ultra ventures into this frequency range, even if it not able to really measure anything. The mere possibility to just be able to see what is going on is amazing for such a cheap device.
I presented the SGS 101 on my blog in the past, for those interested:
Cheers,
Vitor
