In my diploma thesis I described the design and construction of a radio-frequency instrument - a grid-dip meter. The design goal was a solid-state grid-dip meter allowing both automatic and manual frequency sweep. In the automatic mode, an XY oscilloscope is used to display the measured dip. The operation of the assembled instrument was tested on practical security tags.
The grid-dip meter is one of the fundamental radio-frequency instruments. Due to its simplicity, it lacks accuracy and today it is less popular than many years ago. A grid-dip meter can measure the resonance frequency of a security tag and its activity.
The proposed grid-dip meter is based on a negative-resistance radio frequency oscillator. The negative resistance is generated by two N-channel and two P-channel enhancement-mode MOS transistors contained in standard aluminium-gate CMOS logic of the 40xx series.
The circuit of the grid-dip meter is built on a single-sided printed circuit board. The latter was designed in the SprintLayout software. The printed-circuit board was etched and the discrete components were soldered on. Different CMOS chips were tried as well as different bias resistors for best performance. Security tags operate around 8 MHz. The number of turns of the oscillator coil was adjusted to cover the frequency range from 5 MHz to 12 MHz. The operation of the finished grid-dip meter was checked with an XY oscilloscope and an active security tag.
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