Beaverton, OR. Tektronix has announced the RSA7100A wideband signal analysis instrument, which combines 800 MHz of real-time bandwidth with up to two hours of streaming storage at full bandwidth. The new instrument’s 16-kHz to 26.5-GHz frequency range covers a range of analysis needs for critical wide-bandwidth applications.
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 analyze hours of wide-bandwidth data. Equipment to meet these requirements can be 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. Together these capabilities provide a significant improvement over many other high-end signal analyzers on the market today.
Capturing wideband signals is notoriously data-intensive, requiring specialized 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 two hours of streaming capture to internal RAID storage at the full 800-MHz 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 characterized 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.”
The RSA7100A is available now; pricing starts at $135,000.
