IFF Testset teardown and analysis

[Da_Stier]

Hi all,

a couple of weeks ago I was looking around a local HAM radio fleamarket / swapmeet and came across an IFF testset.
IFF stand for "Identification Friend or Foe" and is the system used by military vehicels and aircraft to check for who operates it.
The system works by a request being sent out on one frequency and a response expected on another.
The frequencies are placed somewhere between 1030MHz and around 1080MHz.
The answer must contain a correct value, calculated by a secret key to be valid.
This is of corse just a super high level overview but should be enough for now.

I really didn't want to haul that beast home with me but when it was still standing there minutes before the event was closing down, I got weak. 

The unit is manufactured by the German company "Aeromaritime Systembau GmbH".
It is provided in a giant and very rugged (and heavy) aluminium 19" enclosure.





The actual 19" mount is completely floating on rubber mounts inside the box so that the actual piece of gear is shockproof.



The lid also contains a lot of accessories, including spare fuses, adapters of all sorts as well as RF cables with unique serial numbers matched to the unit.







The unit itself has rather few switches but a whole lot of connectors.
The power (either 120VAC or 230VAC) is provided via a 3 pin military connector, either on the front or the back of the unit.



The insides consist of 3 basic "layers", a power supply on the left, a cardcage with a backplane in the middle and a RF section on the right.



The RF section seems to be made from a lot of standard components, all with SMA or N connectors.
(Attenuators, termination resistors, feedthroughs, adapters, etc.)
Therefore it should be really nice and easy to reuse most of the parts.

The plugin cards are mostly logic but they do contain some rather interesting parts.
Another interesting feature is the extension card directly provided with the unit.



The plugins do contain only military grade ceramic ICs.
A lot of them are even made in Germany and old enough to be made in West Germany.
I'm not entirely sure on who made them, the "f" logo doesn't ring any bell, especially at that age.



One card contains a lot of very interesting "Datel" parts.
I love how each part actually says what it is.
Also note how each EPROM says on the label what it does, pretty cool.





That's how far I got right now so I will report back as soon as I got deeper into the unit.





Greetings,
Michael

[Da_Stier]

Hi all,

I did finally finish to "rough teardown" of the unit.

The powersupply consists of a potted toroidal transformer, a couple of off the shelf DCDC converter modules, as well as a couple of linear regulators.



The RF section consists of two main modules as well as a couple of off the shelf parts (attenuators mainly)





And here is a first look at all the standard RF parts, I could directly put into my drawers:







Greetings,
Michael