Pentek Records Wideband Signals

Feb. 8, 2006

Pentek had an interesting box at the Bus and Board show. The RTS 2500 development platform is designed for real-time wideband data acquisition, signal processing and recording...

William G. Wong

Pentek had an interesting box at the Bus and Board show. The RTS 2500 development platform (see the figure) is designed for real-time wideband data acquisition, signal processing, and recording. In this age of software-based radios, the RTS 2500 development platform provides a way to quickly develop and monitor these types of systems.

The system includes the RTS 2502 6U VME data-capture front end with a pair of 15-bit ADCs and adds four DAC channels with two upconverters. This combination allows the system to capture radio signals, store them, perform analysis and other processing, and then ship it out again. It means that real radio signals can be used to test software radio systems instead of just using generated information. This is key when developing a radio system because a reliable source is not always available and the only way to make sure the source is operating properly is to analyze the communication stream.

The Xilinx FPGA-based system supports Pentek’s SystemFlow API and libraries, allowing preprocessing of radio data before it is stored. Likewise, FPGAs can modify data before it is played back.

The RTS 2502 pricing starts at $29,995. The SystemFlow software ups the price to $41,495.

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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