RF spectrum
According to Tektronix, it’s raised the price-performance bar for mid-range signal analyzers by offering more than double the currently available acquisition bandwidth along with the best in real-time capabilities. By combining reduced time-to-insight and lower cost, the RSA5000 Series signal analyser suits applications ranging from spectrum management, radar, and electronic warfare to radio communications and EMI/EMC.
All designers now must grapple with the ever-increasing complexity of RF signals, as well as become intimate with the seemingly ubiquitous ISM-band technologies. Thus, it’s crucial that they can reliably and efficiently discover transient spectral phenomena created by digital RF circuitry over increasingly wider operational bandwidths.
However, traditional signal analysers are unable to trigger on transient problems. In addition, maximum available acquisition bandwidth in the mid-range is just 40MHz.
Featuring advanced time, amplitude, and DPX trigger functions combined with swept DPX, the RSA5000 Series delivers discovery and capture of these intermittent and rapidly changing signals at up to 85MHz bandwidth. This bandwidth now covers the entire ISM band, which includes common technologies such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, RFID, and Wireless LAN.
Real-Time Transient Discovery
With the RSA5000’s DPX Live RF spectrum display(see the figure), quick detection of previously unseen signal behavior is possible. Moreover, it helps improve test confidence by catching very short duration transients missed by conventional spectrum analyzers.
The Swept DPX engine can collect up to 292,000 spectrum updates per second over its full bandwidth (up to 85MHz), and sweeps the DPX across the full input range of the RSA5000 Series (up to 6.2GHz). Also, the DPX is able to measure spectral transients as brief as 5.8µs.
To capture transients for analysis, the analyser offers frequency-mask, frequency-edge, density, time-qualified, and runt triggers. In addition, it can isolate hard-to-find hardware and software anomalies with cross-domain triggering between multiple instruments. The RSA5000 is able to capture a seamless time record of RF frequencies into deep memory for up to seven seconds at 85MHz bandwidth.
For faster troubleshooting, the RSA5000 Series can analyse captured data in any domain at any time with correlated markers. Automatic pulse measurement and detection helps to simplify and save test time by supporting multiple measurements on the same set of captured data. By incorporating these features into one instrument, it saves on the cost of needing multiple test sets.
Along with wide bandwidth and DPX display, the RSA5000 Series offers spectrum and vector signal analysis with +17dBm TOI and -154dBm/Hz DANL at 1GHz. Low frequency performance comes in with a phase noise of -131dBc/Hz at 10kHz offset and -150dBm DANL at 10 MHz carrier frequency.