[Tommy, Paco]

Since last week I've worked with tommy on getting the RFSoC 2x2 board to get some TFs from simple minicircuits type filters. The first thing I did was set up the board (which is in the office area) for remote access. I hooked up the TCP/IP port to a wall ethernet socket (LIGO-04) and the caltech network assiggned some IP address to our box. I guess eventually we can put this behind the lab network for internal use only.

After fiddling around with the tone-generators and spectrum analyzer tools in loopback configuration (DAC --> ADC direct connection), we noticed that lower frequency (~ 1 MHz) signals were hardly making it out/back into the board... so we looked at some of the schematics found here and saw that both RF data converters (ADC & DAC) interfaces are AC coupled through a BALUN network in the 10 - 8000 MHz band (see Attachment #1). This is in principle not great news if we want to get this board ready for audio-band DSP.

We decided that while Tommy works on measuring TFs for SHP-200 all the way up to ~ 2 GHz (which is possible with the board as is) I will design and put together an analog modulation/demodulation frontend so we can upconvert all our "slow" signals < 1MHz for fast, wideband DSP. and demodulate them back into the audio band. The BALUN network is pictured in Attachment #2 on the board, I'm afraid it's not very simple to bypass without damaging the PCB or causing some other unwanted effect on the high-speed DSP.