2GHz transceiver

[Shazlan]

Hi,

I am assisting my client to source for an RF transceiver. Her application involves sending a low-power RF signal (around the range of 2-4GHz) to a fruit and measure the strength of the reflected signal. The purpose of her study is to determine the ripeness (sugar and water content) of the particular fruit. Most of the transceivers we found on the web are data transceiver - sending and receiving encrypted data wirelessly and no way to 'remove' the data portion from the transceiver.

We are hoping to find a transceiver (hopefully, small in size) that has a programmable MCU on-board (so that we can program the transceiver to translate the measured signal strength into fruit ripeness) and ideally, we would like to use LabVIEW for the programming interface (if this is possible and such transceiver is available).

I appreciate if any one here can point me to somewhere. I've been looking for almost 1 month now and have tried numerous keywords but still to no avail. Thank you. 

[Yardov]

Hello Shazlan,

There are several challenges to this post and I think we can give you some guidelines on some of them. National Instruments has RF test equipment to generate and analyze RF signals. Depending on the programming and setup, you might get different results.

An example of a generation device is any of the Signal Generators. Browse also into the Signal Analyzers and try to come up with the following answers:

1. Will you be generating a modulated signal or an unmodulated carrier?

2. At what power levels will you be generating?

Basically, you need an instrument to generate the signal and another one to analyze the reflection. Just like a traditional radar application. 

There are multiple other factors that you should try to solve early on the game:

1. How will you isolate all other RF signals so that your reflection is indeed from the fruit and not from any other object?

2. Synchronization from the generation to the analyzer is critical so that you can differentiate the generated signal versus the reflected signal. This is achieved by triggering.

Hope this gives you some idea on what to look for and get you started with the project. 

Message Edited by Yardov on 11-23-2009 09:37 AM