After trying to use the Analog devices HMC742A VGA for a third time with no success, I went back to the search filters and specifically selected Qorvo as my preferred manufacturer, mostly because their technical support is truly fantastic.

I'd seen their variable gain development board before, but was put off by the fact that it was tuned to 2150 MHz which is quite a bit above the 806 MHz that I required. I'm now pretty sure I can replace the necessary passives to correct it. Whether it was the fact that their dev board was very reasonably priced or just plain desperation, I do not know, but I'm very glad I bought it as I got it working fairly quickly. It even comes with a USB adapter daughter board and windows evaluation software - Total bargain!

The really great thing about this gadget is that it has some real power - a massive 0.5 watts! It needed to be cascaded with my QPL9065 low noise amp, but that was ok. The results were very nice indeed. Now to get it hooked up to an Arduino via SPI and insert a RSSI unit to monitor the signal strength.