RF MUX-DEMUX

Although most parts of this project are NDA-d, I can elaborate without being too specific.

The company Sagax Communications has a main portfolio around SDR equipment. They develop and maintain specialized hardwares for signal processing and also softwares for user interface. They are also providing RF hardware for signal conditioning. Switching, splitting, amplifying, filtering and more.

This application I was working on was a part of a bigger RF system. It consisted of signal sources and signal sinks in the form of radios. The signals had to be channeled to the radios in a flexible way. This task required a complex MUX-DEMUX matrix. The inside of the matrix consisted of hundreds of connectors. Although the main concept and architecture of the matrix was already designed when I joined the project, I helped fine tuning the design to the costumers requirements.

One of my tasks was to document the positions and pairs of all these ports. I did this in AutoCAD. The final drawing was a custom length A1 print while the texts were the size of a normal A4 printed text. It was huge. As it would have been impossible to manually name every port, I used excel to generate the names of all the ports, exported that to CSV and imported that into AutoCAD.

The matrix had to be controlled and I got the opportunity to make the controller circuits. The RF design was made by a colleague but he was not familiar with digital control circuits. Following his design’s requirements, I prototyped and tested the controllers and then integrated it into the system.