The Red Pitaya Stem Lab is a multi function piece of test equipment no bigger than the palm of your hand. For the most part, my needs for test equipment are not that demanding, I just need simple devices with simple controls to give me the kinds of information I need for my homebrew projects. For my needs there are 5 basic functions listed below that I will find immediate use for, but there are other uses it has also, like being turned into an SRD Transceiver or being used as an LCR meter among others. Total bandwidth is 50Mhz
1. Oscilloscope: doing probe compensation.
2. Function Generator: is part of the oscilloscope interface upto 1v p-p output in Sqr, Sin etc.
3. Frequency Analyzer: A usable 50Mhx of bandwidth is good enough for the 80 and 40m band projects that I build things for.
4. Bode Analyzer: I have spent a fair amount of time today playing with the bode analyzer and trying to get to grips with it, I am unsure about things like what probes to use, what input settings and what voltages to use on the sweep generator. Well i got this far and have a plot that looks like it should. One thing that i did not do was terminate the double tuned band pass filter with 50 ohms, this will have an effect on this plot and how it looks. But, it does actually look like a thing, even if it looks rather wonky and the high side attenuation is rising at the edge where it should still be falling.
5, Logic Analyzer: Not something that I use very often, but when you have some Arduino widget that is not playing ball, its nice to have the right tool for the job on hand.
At 3mhz a square wave still looks square, by 5mhz its starting to look sinusoidal, nothing fancy, but good enough for my needs. All in all, i am happy with how well this thing works, I am no power user with high demands, I just want to be able to see a waveform, produce a waveform and see spectral content of RF i am producing with the highest frequency of interest being 7mhz, I look forward to putting the Red Pitaya to use in the CW Receiver project i am just starting.
My initial thoughts after using it for some time are still positive, there are some things that are a little funny in how they work, but for the most part, this is going to be a good tool to have on my bench, that will do just about everything that i could want.
