National Instruments Introduces New LabVIEW Toolkit for GPS Receiver Testing

“The GPS Toolkit is a highly capable, easy-to-use solution for simulating a GPS environment, which gives us complete control of the simulated receiver position,” said Leonardo Bonanomi, Test Solutions Manager for Services for Electronic Manufacturing (SEM). “This toolkit, together with NI TestStand and NI LabVIEW software, helps us easily build flexible and scalable automated test systems for GPS receivers.”



With the new toolkit, engineers can use a combination of simulated and recorded GPS waveforms as a comprehensive, low-cost solution for receiver design validation and verification. By recording live GPS signals off the air with an NI PXI-5661 RF vector signal analyser and an NI PXI-5690 pre-amplifier (low-noise amplifier), engineers can capture GPS signals with natural impairments that a receiver would observe in the real world. They can also generate both simulated and recorded signals with the NI PXIe-5672 RF vector signal generator, by continuously streaming GPS waveforms from hard disk. With a 2 TB redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) hard drive option, engineers can generate up to 12.5 minute of non-repeating simulated waveform or 25 hours of continuous recorded GPS signal to test how the receiver responds to a broad range of circumstances.



Engineers can combine the GPS Toolkit with the NI Modulation Toolkit for LabVIEW, NI TestStand test management software and PXI RF modular instrumentation for a complete low-cost production test solution. Because PXI modular instrumentation is purely software-defined, the same PXI system can test wireless devices that use other standards such as RDS, WiFi, GSM, WCDMA, Bluetooth and DVB. PXI measurement systems offer a lower cost, more flexible and higher throughput solution compared to traditional instrumentation in production test applications. For multi-protocol test, the cost savings of PXI is even greater.