Dear All,
I need to design an atteuator to simulate 9000ft of ADSL cable loss.
Could anybody please let me know what are are the do's and don't's on
practical design of it. Based on my studies, it should give 22.76 dB
of attenuation at 150 kHz and 50.7455dB attenuation at 772 kHz.
What else should i considered more?
Best Regards
This reminds me of something I made in the late '90s. I had to test HDSL
cards and we didn't like the idea of heavy cable drums in our
manufacturing test setup. So I made some equivalent circuits out of
discrete R,L and C components on a board that could plug into our racks.
Steps:
1. Get the RLGC parameters for the line you want to simulate. These
will be a function of frequency. Bellcore used to publish technical
reports with cable parameters measured on a representative sample of
actual subscriber lines.
2. Work out how accurate your simulation needs to be, in terms of dB
error as a function of frequency. There will probably be some upper
frequency, beyond which you don't care about the accuracy at all (which
is good, as most simulations based on lumped elements have an upper
frequency limit beyond which the accuracy gets really bad).
BTW, your use of so many decimal places in 22.76 and 50.7455 dB is rather
naive; you are unlikely to get an accuracy of better than +/- a few dB
over any non-trivial frequency range.
3. Create a lumped model of the line (see the links (below) for ideas),
and check it in your preferred version of Spice. Increase the number of
sections (which reduces the ripple and increses the upper frequency
limit) until you get the required accuracy with practical component
values. Check both the attenuation and impedance.
The inductors and (to a lesser extent) the capacitors will not behave
like their ideal models. You will need to include this in your
simulation. BTW, avoid ceramic caps here, unless they are NP0.
The loss in these reactive components actually helps with the simulation.
Remember, we are trying to recreate the behaviour of something that has
both skin effect and dielectric losses.
4. Lay it out on a PCB. There will probably be a few hundred sections,
so a PCB is the only practical way. You must be very careful with the
layout, as crosstalk will ruin the attenuation characteristics. (BTW,
crosstalk is also a problem for cable drums.)
5. Build and test.
Some links to similar posts:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.electronics.design/browse_thread/threa
d/ec84b4ce3d5a07c3
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dsp/browse_thread/thread/90590c5fe7e9
fb52/
Regards,
Allan