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.
Whether in-theater, in covert operations, or any other surveillance environment, measurement equipment requires not only high performance but convenience and flexibility.
X-COM's IQC5000A Spectrum Capture and Playback System offers all three – in the smallest, lightest form factor in the industry. For field work, it operates from a 12 VDC source and 120 VAC everywhere else. It can be configured with up 2 TBytes of internal storage to provide up to 3.5 days of continuous capture with a 1-MHz capture bandwidth and 44 minutes at its full 160-MHz bandwidth. It is plug-compatible with industry-leading signal analyzers that provide pristine input signals as its receive front end, and it provides one or two channels of record and playback capability as well.
The IQC5000A combined with instruments and software from third parties can be custom-configured for surveillance applications within X-COM's Mobile Measurement Vehicle (MMV). The MMV offers broad configurability to meet the demands of each customer including spectrum capture, storage, analysis, and playback, spectrum monitoring of any frequency range for short or long periods, direction finding, and spectrum mapping.
When discretion is critical, the MMV can be configured using a common commercial rooftop luggage carrier in which antennas and other hardware are contained with no external markings other than those desired by the customer.