Surveillance

Today’s modern battlefield equipment, as well as commercial wireless systems must operate flawlessly in an increasingly complex and congested electromagnetic spectrum. Understanding the characteristics of the myriad of emitters and noise sources is critical to situational awareness. If intermittent signals are adversely affecting system or network performance, it is essential that these signals be captured with the highest degree of fidelity independent of how often they occur, their frequency or their transmission duration. Signal analyzers alone cannot do this over more than a few seconds of recording time. What is needed is a means to capture and record large segments of the RF spectrum continuously for long periods of time, the ability to correlate captured signals with system behavior, and the capability to search very large signal files (potentially several Terabytes) efficiently to find and extract signals of interest for more detailed analysis.

The X-COM Systems,IQC-2110 long duration continuous RF recording and playback system is designed to turn your high performance signal analyzer from Tektronix, Agilent or Rhode and Schwarz into a powerful, high dynamic range, high fidelity RF signal recorder and playback system.

As shown above, the signal analyzer is used to select the segment of the RF spectrum to be recorded. The frequency segment of interest can be anywhere within the tuning range of the signal analyzer (options are currently available up to 40 GHz) with an instantaneous RF bandwidth up to the capability of the signal analyzer – typically up to440 or 110 MHz depending on the signal analyzer used. The signal analyzer's advanced functions such as complex triggering or real time signal analysis do not affect continuous recording. Throughout the process, theIQC-2110 RF Signal Recorder continuously captures the 16 bit I and Q RF signal representations.

Depending on capture bandwidth and other factors the recording time can be hours or even days. Should it be desired to replay all or a portion of the recorded spectrum an X-COM CPG-2110 Continuous Playback Generator can be used to convert the high resolution, digital signal information into analog form so that it can be used to drive any of a wide variety of Vector Signal Generators. The VSG converts the analog I&Q information from the CPG-2110 back into the original RF frequency or any other frequency desired. To facilitate the analysis of multi-terabyte files, typically exceeding file sizes that most signal processing tools can accommodate, X-COM Systems provides a powerful SigAnalyst workstation and several software tools that can be used to display signals, search for hard to find signals and extract signals of interest.