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Problem Statement
The goal of Electronic Warfare is to design an RF system that can help deny usage of spectrum by the enemy to plan, coordinate and communicate. It is also necessary to design robust, wireless information systems that can work in the harsh RF environments found on today's battlefields. Spectrum is often crowded and dynamic in bandwidth and frequency utilization and it might be just as likely a particular system sees interference from the enemy as it might from other "friendly" users. To help assure that a deployed design will work, there is no substitute for spectrum recordings that; are of the highest fidelity, that can be shared throughout the design team, and can be modified and then re-injected, at IF or RF, in to the systems under test. Ideally a designer would want spectrum captures that were taken in-situ so the communications environments can be accurately reproduced.
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X-COM Systems Products
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SigAnalyst Workstation
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Resources
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X-COM Systems Solutions for Electronic Warfare
The key ingredient to any EW solution is high fidelity knowledge of the RF spectrum you are trying to control. Without this, you cannot accurately determine subtle and important waveform characteristics that may provide clues to the number and types of emitters, especially if some are using spread spectrum techniques. The IQC-2110 RF Signal Recorder, records digital I & Q data streams that are provided from industry leading signal analyzers. No signal degradation results from this recording and storage. The signal fidelity is exactly that produced by the superior RF front end, down converter and A/Ds of the signal analyzer. One need look no further than the specifications of the Agilent, Tektronix or Rohde & Schwarz signal analyzers that are directly plug compatible with the IQC-2110.
The IQC-2110 can record across an RF span of up to 110 MHz. It samples the digital I&Q data streams from the signal analyzers at up to 150MS/s and can store data on to RAID5 disk arrays up to 16 Tbytes in storage capacity. This translates to over 9 hours at this maximum sample rate. Lower spans and commensurately lower sample rates provides days worth of capacity. The "Step and Stare" feature of the IQC-2110 enables the user to write a macro that controls how long the signal analyzer and IQC-2110 dwell at a specified RF center frequency before tuning to a new span. Thus contiguous or non-contiguous segments of spectrum can be recorded for as short a time as 2 second increments. If wider RF segments are required without retuning, the X-COM Systems WARP product line allows direct RF sampling and recording of bandwidths up to 6GHz.
Terabyte files cannot be transferred from the IQC-2110 data packs to a PC for analysis quickly if the transfer media is limited to USB or Ethernet. To solve this issue, the IQC-2110 provides eSATA and mini SAS ports to enable extremely high transfer rates to disk arrays for storage.
Once there, the X-COM Systems Spectro-X application is used to view (See Fig. 1), and then search for waveforms of interest. Spectro-X also allows for specific time segments of the capture file to be stored so searches can be narrowed in scope or a specific waveform occurrence saved and used as a search mask. Multiple views of the captured spectral recording can be open at the same time allowing the operator frequency, time, phase, amplitude and persistence views simultaneously. (See Fig. 2)
The X-COM software tool set also lets the user modify or create new sets of waveforms. The RF Editor application provides a user interface identical to music or video editing tools. Waveforms can be decimated, frequency shifted, filtered, interpolated and saved. In this manner a library of waveforms or waveform segments can be created and then precisely aligned and concatenated in the time domain. These new files are then available for playback.
The IQC Control software enables the user to recall files from storage and to be played through the X-COM Systems Continuous Playback Generator (CPG-2110). Looped or single file playback are set via a menu. The CPG-2110 outputs analog I & Q symbol streams which drive the baseband inputs of industry leading Vector Signal Generators. Alternatively, the user can drive the X-COM Systems 4CH-VSG-2000 which accepts digital I&Q from stored files and provides up to four, independently sourced, simultaneous, phase coherent RF outputs from 50MHz to 2GHz and bandwidths to 110MHz.
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