ADALM-PHASER CN0566 Python Calibration

Hi Solan, your signal strength is very low.  At that distance, the "ADC Counts" should be >200.  But you are seeing <10.  Are you using the HB100 that was included in the kit?  And powering it with around 5V?  Or if you are using a different x band source, try increasing its power.  

Yes, I am using the included HB100 with a usb a adapter we had at the lab, however I will verify the voltage. 

The HB100 is recieving 5V at the board, but when placed 1ft from the phaser, I get on average 100 adc samples, with a peaks of 160 occasionally

Try rotating the HB100 90 deg.  Both the HB100 and the Phaser antennas are vertically polarized and if you have one at the wrong polarization, it will dramatically reduce the received signal.  

Rotating the HB100 at the same distance resulted in ADC counts of 
[37.588140026876005, 3.4490135322709454, 37.949539512481294, 8.412604484062468, 13.228671245552636, 19.60881350179774, 39.92655628562632, 20.008254024334413]

Ok.  Can you show me the graph of the find_HB100 program results?  

Yes, 

Oriented with "Gravity" label on top.

Oriented with "Gravity" label on left

That looks correct as well.  Try rerunning the cal with the HB100 about 3 ft away.  Then post the pict of the array signal strength vs steering angle.   

The hb100 was backwards.

Ah ok!  It's always the last thing you check!  Glad it got worked out.  For anyone else struggling with an issue like this, the next two things I would have suggested to check are:

1.  Lower the max VCO frequency.  Your HB100 was at 10.42GHz, so that plus the IF freq (normally 2.2 GHz) gives a max VCO freq of 12.62 GHz.  This is on the upper end of what the HMC735 can do (it is only guaranteed for operation between 10.5 and 12.2 GHz).  You can change the 2.2G to something like 1.9 G in the config.py file here:  https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/pyadi-iio/blob/master/examples/phaser/config.py

2.  The last thing to check is the USB C power supply.  With everything powered up, we pull nearly 15W for the Phaser kit.  That is taxing for most USBC power supplies.  You really need one that is rated at 3.5A or 4.0A.  Otherwise, the 5V rail will droop, and that can manifest in a bunch of different problems.  Our favorite supply (and the one that now ships with all new Phaser kits) is the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 USB C supply.  It is rated at 3.5A, and it has always worked flawlessly.  The official Raspberry Pi USB C supply also works well.  But when something super weird is happening, and you can't figure out what it could be, it doesn't hurt to try a new USB C supply.    

Ah ok!  It's always the last thing you check!  Glad it got worked out.  For anyone else struggling with an issue like this, the next two things I would have suggested to check are:

1.  Lower the max VCO frequency.  Your HB100 was at 10.42GHz, so that plus the IF freq (normally 2.2 GHz) gives a max VCO freq of 12.62 GHz.  This is on the upper end of what the HMC735 can do (it is only guaranteed for operation between 10.5 and 12.2 GHz).  You can change the 2.2G to something like 1.9 G in the config.py file here:  https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/pyadi-iio/blob/master/examples/phaser/config.py

2.  The last thing to check is the USB C power supply.  With everything powered up, we pull nearly 15W for the Phaser kit.  That is taxing for most USBC power supplies.  You really need one that is rated at 3.5A or 4.0A.  Otherwise, the 5V rail will droop, and that can manifest in a bunch of different problems.  Our favorite supply (and the one that now ships with all new Phaser kits) is the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 USB C supply.  It is rated at 3.5A, and it has always worked flawlessly.  The official Raspberry Pi USB C supply also works well.  But when something super weird is happening, and you can't figure out what it could be, it doesn't hurt to try a new USB C supply.