Today's modern radars must operate in an RF environment that is increasingly congested and can include both deliberate jamming and unintentional degradation from a myriad of sources. Modern systems incorporate frequency agility, pulse compression, phased array designs, and many other complex RF characteristics. To ensure continued effectiveness, even in the most challenging of environments, it is critical that easy to use tools are available to create new waveforms for testing and to generate noise and other signals for the purposes of testing robustness and performance. What is needed is a means to generate and test even the most complex of waveforms to speed development timelines. In addition, the capability is needed to be able to capture and record large segments of the RF spectrum for long periods of time so that radar signals can be recorded for future analysis. When testing jamming systems in the chamber, a means to capture the entire radar/jammer interaction is frequently needed to support analysis and verify designs.
X-COM's IQC5000A Series Spectrum Capture and Playback systems complemented by Spectro-X Signal Analysis Toolkit software and RF Editor spectrum file manipulation software are well suited to performing all of these tasks. Whether they're used for evaluating performance on the test range or creating threat scenarios, X-COM's tools are the most comprehensive in the industry.
In addition, the X-COM's multi-channel vector signal generators makes it easier, more accurate, and less expensive to expose radar systems to realistic user-defined spectral environments. Together they form a formidable arsenal of measurement and validation tools that represent a more modern way of achieving increasingly complex goals.