Design and evaluation of a stroboscopic signal converter based on discrete transistor clocked comparator

Stroboscopic converters are used for transformation of high-frequency signals from the GHz range in to lover frequency signals. The transformation is done in time domain where the transformed signal is obtained from several hundreds of repetitive input signal periods. Some of most sensitive ground penetrating radars (GPR) utilize balance comparator as signal detector. In this work discrete stroboscopic signal converter (DSSC) based on discrete transistor clocked comparator is discussed. We show design of such stroboscopic converter and test setup for parameters measurement. As results is shown test results of DSSC signal amplitude transfer linearity and mathematical method for bandwidth calculation is discussed. Bandwidth is calculated using deconvolution method. Approximate bandwidth of this converter is about 3 GHz, but the result highly depends on the quality of the time based test signals.