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This section contains scenarios and debug hints. If you are facing the same problem, try the solutions here first.

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Tip

Solution: Check the PSR count when clean signal is being transmitted. If it is relatively low (i.e., ~0.3 or lower), adjust your antenna length, position or consider give the receiver side a boost. To do so, go to the RTL-SDR Source block, change the Gain method to "Manual", RF gain to 20dB. Run the transmission again, it should boost up to a relatively high PSR (~0.9) with clean signal.

You are suggested to record signals at a private place rather than in the lab, so that other teams who are transmitting at the same time will not affect your recording. 

Warning

Possible cause 3: Cut-off too early

Tip

Solution: Check the bode plot with AD2, make sure your wanted signal is not being suppressed. 

Feed a clean signal recorded into your LTSpice, if you are unable to get a PSR or the PSR is obviously lower than what you observed through direct transmission, this confirms the possible cause.

When you are using trimmers, vibration and impact during transport may cause its resistance to vary. You might want to tune the circuit regularly and eventually replace trimmers with fixed resistors. 

Sometimes, your circuit too noisy that it is hard to determine the passband gain from the bode plot, you can also pass the clean signal without interference, to see if you can recover any PSR. 

 

Warning

Possible cause 4: Cut-off too late

Tip

Solution: Check the bode plot with AD2, make sure the interference signal is being suppressed enough. 

Feed a clean signal recorded into your LTSpice, if you are able to get a PSR off the same level of what you observed through direct transmission, gradually increase the level of suppression. 1/10, 1/5, 1/3 ... If at a certain step, you are unable to get any PSR, this confirms the possible cause.

You are the one who should decide what is a good suppression. Higher suppression usually means more components and thus higher cost, you should weigh between various aspect while designing a product. 

Sometimes, your circuit too noisy that it is hard to determine the passband gain from the bode plot, you can also make use of the FFT response function and exam the amplitude of signals at different frequencies. 

 

Warning

Possible cause 5: Passband signal distorted.

Tip

Solution: Check the bode plot with AD2, you might notice crazy passband gain or ringing presents. 

High passband gain might be introduced when you do not tune R1 and R2 together to match the unity gain, ringing my due to the nature of the design of filter.

They are unavoidable sometimes, but you can choose to shift the gain hump to the right place so that it will not affect your passband signal. 

 

Warning

Possible cause 6: Unstable DC signal overriding

Tip

Solution: The circuit is drawing power from your laptop USB adaptor, the DC power could be unstable, especially if you are not connecting your laptop to the power source. You might notice the signal output is rather "wavy" in LTSpice simulation and actual circuit experiment.

You can always add a passive high pass filter at the output of the circuit to regulate the DC instability. 

This high pass filter will not count towards your final design stage. 

 

Warning

Possible cause 7: Reception is very weak, PSR with clean signal is very low despite you put the input and output very close and positioning in a clean environment. 

Tip

Solution: Give a manual boost to your receiver by change the RTS-SDR gain mode to Manual, and RF gain to 10 dB

Notice that aiming for high PSR is not the ultimate goal, your goal should be get a comparable PSR after filter out the noise. During the demo session, the teams from the same design will be using the same set of devices, so you should not panic if your friends are getting higher PSR than you during the lab sessions, it could simply because the difference between computation power of your laptops. 

 

Warning

Possible cause 8: Hardware limitation.  (Laptop computation power not enough.)

Tip

Solution: Always use the laptop with better performance to transmit the signal. If you checked all the setting and brought the antennas very close, but still no PSR shown, try switch the transmitter and receiver laptop, connect your laptop power supply and this usually solves the problem. 

 

Warning

Possible cause 9: Hardware limitation.  (Laptop not compatible with hardwares)

Tip

Solution: This is a very rare situation but it happens. Especially with ThinkPad based on our past experience. If your bode plot, FFT, waveform all looks promising and you have tried everything above, consider use the lab's desktop to run everything. It could be because your laptop do not work well with the devices. This could happen to both LTSpice simulation or physical circuit. 

 

Warning

Possible cause 10: AD2 recorded signal not centred at 0.

Tip

Image Added

Solution: If you notice that when reading testspice.dat and the input signal is not centred at zero (like the above image), double check:

 1. Zero offset before exporting

 2. AD2 1- GND connection

 3. RTL-SDR GND connection