Signal analyser targets radar/EW design

Increasingly, designers of radar and electronic warfare (EW) communications systems and components need to perform modulation and pulse analyses at wider bandwidth. Spectrum managers also need to record and analyse hours of wide bandwidth data.

Equipment to meet these requirements can be very expensive, often requiring piecemeal solutions from multiple vendors or limited use, purpose-built equipment.

The RSA7100A reduces the cost of wideband signal capture, record, and analysis while increasing the likelihood of capturing wideband signal transients.

The instrument can trigger on and measure signals of just 700 ns duration in the frequency domain in real time while offering in-depth signal analysis with SignalVu-PC RF and vector analysis software.

Capturing wideband signals is notoriously data intensive, requiring specialised systems for capturing real-time data and plenty of patience to sift through terabytes of files looking for the signals of interest.

The RSA7100A allows users to record up to 2 hours of streaming capture to internal RAID storage at the full 800MHz bandwidth for such applications as environment recording and long event sequence analysis.

Once the wideband signal data has been captured, the DataVu-PC software application makes it easy to quickly find and mark events of interest hiding within terabytes of stored data. DataVu-PC offers amplitude search and mark plus pulse measurements. 

Up to 2,000,000 pulses can be characterised for power, pulse-width, repetition interval and start-stop frequencies.

Measurements can be exported in Pulse Descriptor Word format for use with other tools.  Also, using DataVu-PC, smaller IQ files can be saved from within the longer captured file based on search and mark or manual selection.

“Industry-wide there is a need to build and rigorously qualify critical wideband radar and EW systems that will be deployed in the field. At the same time, the demands in the field have gotten greater, from wider bandwidth signals to longer signal captures,” said Jim McGillivary, general manager of RF and Component Solutions at Tektronix. “Our new solution solves these challenges with its combination of more bandwidth, integrated streaming storage and advanced analysis capabilities – all at a price that makes the RSA7100A an unbeatable value for these applications.”