EU1KY Antenna Analyser( 100KHz-1400MHz )

Logo EU1KY Antenna Analyser( 100KHz-1400MHz )

Hardware Package

6M vertical scan on smith chart
This page is a description of the customizations I made to the open source/open hardware EU1KY antenna analyzer project. The FAA-450 Antenna Analyzer is built from a STM32-F7 Discovery board, a small RF board consisting of 2 direct conversion receivers fed from an RF bridge and a battery/power management board. The analyzer uses DSP techniques to analyze the 10kHz IF audio output from the direct conversion receivers to compute the complex voltage and current applied to the antenna port. From this, an OSL (Open/Short/Load) calibration is applied to give a complex impedance value for the antenna. From this impedance, VSWR may be calculated when referenced to 50ohms (other reference impedances are also supported). Kits or a built project are available from www.elekitsorparts.com This project originated from the EU1KY Antenna Analyzer V3, which features a 4.3" colour TFT LCD, capacitive touch screen, HF/VHF(UHF) frequency coverage, built-in TDR function, signal generator function and multiple scanning curves for impedance and VSWR measurements. Full open source software is available via the github link listed at the bottom of this page.. Development is by cross compiling for the STM32F746 board on windows (Embitz IDE) or linux (makefile with arm-none-eabi-gcc). The generated F7Discovery.bin file is uploaded to the device using ST-Link loader from STMicroelectronics. For windows, you will need to get the STSW-LINK004 utility and STSW-LINK007 windows drivers from the above link. As of Oct 2020, under arch linux, I have been using the stlink package from the main repository to provide the st-flash utility for loading either the .bin file or the .hex file of the project (see below for example cmd line).

List of Custom Software Modifications

Modify the splash screen to display my QSL card with contact information. This pops up on the screen at power up and stays until the screen is tapped. One can enable the custom logo splash screen by generating a 480x272 png or bmp file and placing it on the SD card under the AA directory. The file must be called logo.png or logo.bmp to be loaded. If a custom logo file is not successfully loaded, the default splash screen will be displayed. You may have to play with the image file options during generation. I used 24 bit color(RGB) with no compression or embedded color tables.

Splash screen

Modify the serial remote control protocol to work with John Coppens ON6JC/LW3HAZ excellent Linsmith program from linSmith: Smith charting program for Linux. I modified Johns program for remote serial control. It doesnt appear as if the patch files have made it into the mainstream release yet. See discussion on sourceforge.net.

Modify the TDR screen to display coax length in metric and imperial units.

TDR scan showing both metric and imperial lengths

Update 19-Oct-2020 - After having updated to the V3 hardware board, I am now running software based on https://github.com/ted051/Analyzer_EU1KY_CEC_AKF. Binaries or the source is available from this github site. This version and the V3 board supports the analyzer working up to 1400Mhz, which is very nice for 1.2GHz ham band antenna work, the real time clock, wspr,ft4,ft8 transmitter, tdr, crystal testing, S21 scans for testing through filters and a whole lot more. My modified version is hosted on my github site listed at the bottom of the page.

Notes
Note: if your battery fails to charge, you may need to upgrade the ST-Link firmware on your discovery board. This was discovered when a stock 32F746GDISCOVERY was used to replace a broken board. Update the ST-Link firmware using STSW-LINK007 package from https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/development-tools/software-development-tools/stm32-software-development-tools/stm32-programmers/stsw-link007.html#overview. The update supports windows and linux.

Note: When using a stock board, you need to change 4 jumper settings. The jumpers on the stock board that need changing: move SB3/SB5 to SB1/SB4. Check SB1/SB4 for continuity and that SBSB3/SB5 are now open circuit. These jumpers are near the SD card connector and are used to drive the Si5351 SCL/SCD on the RF board.

Note: To program the new image under linux (install stlink package from your os repository):
Connect a mini usb cable to the left most (ST-LINK) port (also used for charging and ttyACM0 serial port for remote control).
"st-flash --format ihex write F7Discovery.hex" or
"st-flash write F7Discovery.bin 0x8000000"
The right most USB port labeled USB-HS is used to access the SD card when the "USBHSReader" main menu option has been selected.

Note: Tips on setting battery voltage monitor. I have not found any mention of how to use the "Config/Accu Settings" screen. First off, I assume the Accu stands for accumulator ( an alternate name for battery ).
Step 1; set MaxV to 4.200 and MinV to 3.000 by clicking on the VoltMaxDisplay button and then using the + and - increment/decrement keys to adjust the voltage. These numbers make sense if you are using a standard 18650 LiPo cell as a power supply. The high number is used to indicate the full charged voltage where the battery capacity is defined at 100%. The lower number defines the voltage when the battery is basically considered flat with 0% capacity.
Step 2; charge the unit until the battery is fully charged ( charge LED on power board goes out ).
Step 3; once the battery is fully charged go back to the "Config/Accu Settings" screen and check it remembered you MaxV and MinV settings, press the "Set Max Value" button. This sets the A/D scaling for the battery measurement circuit. It is assumed that when you press this button that the battery is fully charged and is at the MaxV value. You will see MaxFact field update which I believe is the A/D counts/volt scaling factor. The battery display should now be reasonably useful to indicate how close you are getting to battery charge depletion.

Note: The connections to the STM audio inputs on the blue 3.5mm connector appear to be critical to proper operation. If you do the hardware calibration and then the OSL calibration and do a wide band SWR scan of the load, you should see an SWR line very close to one. This is really the definition of calibration. If you see a very ragged line with SWR reading bouncing around from 2 to 20, you may have to try swapping the 2 audio signals at the blue mic jack on the STM discovery cpu board. Also before calibration you should check that the configuration has been set up for the SI5351_MAX_FREQ (260Mhz for mine), OSL_RLOAD (50), OSL_RSHORT (0), OSL_ROPEN (Open), BAND_FMIN (100kHz), BAND_FMAX (1300MHz). Any changes to the above configuration items must be followed by a new HW calibration as well as the 3 part OSL (open,short,load) calibration.

Note: I had an issue compiling the project under embitz. Some how, some of the code got compiled with hardware floating point support and some of it without. Everything compiled, but I got a whole lot of ld (link) errors at the end of the build process. To repair this, in embitz, goto build/clean workspace. I had been using build/clean target which did not solve the issue.
Files / Downloads / Links
Free windows IDE for ARM(also runs under linux wine): https://www.embitz.org/.
STMicroelectronics ST-Link software: https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/st-link-v2.html.
My Github Page: https://github.com/ve7it/Analyzer_EU1KY_CEC_AKF
You can download John Coppens ON6JC/LW3HAZ excellent Linsmith program from http://jcoppens.com/soft/linsmith/index.en.php
My linsmith remote control patch: linsmith-remote.patch for linsmith-0.99.28 (19.2kB).
My 6M 50MHz antenna being measured above: http://ve7it.cowlug.org/6m-five-eigths.html .
Analyzer kit/assembled supplier: www.elekitsorparts.com

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