Signal instrument is portable
10 June 2008
The RTS 2721 triples record/playback rate for wideband analogue signals for optimal radar.
The portable signal recording and playback instrument from Pentek has three times the peak record and playback rates of the company’s RTS 2500 VME systems, reaching 500MByte/sec for communications and radar applications that require acquisition, down-conversion, analysis, up conversion and reproduction of baseband and IF (intermediate frequency) signals.
It is able to digitise, record and reproduce two signals up to 60MHz and provides up to 2.4TByte of storage. Data files are recorded directly to a native NTFS files system, compatble with Windows file systems and many Linux OS for access to files without lengthy conversion processing. NTFS files are used directly for playback to eliminate a pre-processing file conversion for playback too.
It has the company’s 7641 software radio transceiver, two 14bit ADCs which digitise two analogue input signals at sample up to 125MHz. In this way, it is able to handle IF input frequencies with centre frequencies up to 300MHz for baseband signals up to 60MHz.
Multiple digital down converters translate tuneable frequency slices of input spectrum down to baseband. The output is then filtered. The programmable digital down converters decimation ranges from two to 32,768 with output signal bandwidths from 8kHz to 60MHz.
Analogue to digital and direct digital conversion output samples can be recorded continuously in real-time to internal hard disk RAID (redundant array of independent disks) at aggregate sustained rates up to 500MByte/sec. Synchronous multi-channel recording for beamforming applications and independent recording of multiple channels, each at different data rates.
Playback allows analogue reproduction of digital signals stored on the RAID through the two 16bit DACs. Sustained playback data rates up to 480MByte/sec, digital sample streams can be delivered directly to the DAC to generate baseband signals up to 60MHz.
Built-in interpolation filters can boost baseband sampling rates up to 500MHz for the optimum smoothing of the analogue output waveform. A digital up converter can translate recorded baseband signals to IF centre frequencies up to 160MHz.
A windows XP Professional orkstation with a dual-core Opteron processor and integral 17in LCD are incorporated into the unit which weighs23lbs and measures 16.8in x 5.7in and 11.5in high.
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