Averna and NI Team up on Recording and Playback of RF Signals
August 8, 2013. Averna chose NIWeek to highlight its recent announcement of the availability of RF Studio for National Instruments Software Defined Radio Platform (USRP), converting the USRP into a portable and cost-effective RF system for the recording and playback of real-world GNSS signals.
National Instruments USRP is an affordable, PC-hosted platform used with NI LabVIEW system design software to build wireless communications systems for research and education. RF Studio is Averna’s proprietary software platform designed to streamline work with real-world RF signals. It provides user-friendly modules for capturing, processing, analyzing, archiving, and playing back RF spectrum while also maintaining the signal-recording context.
Working together, Averna and NI teams developed RF Studio for the USRP, a portable solution to record and play back live RF environments to accelerate RF project work. RF Studio’s LabVIEW-compatible plug-in support delivers value to LabVIEW users as it gives them quick access to a rich toolset for their in-house applications, and it supports additional capture sources and customized views.
“RF Studio for the USRP is the only cost-effective and portable product on the market that offers the flexibility to cover a wide variety of use cases, thus making it a very competitive solution for general-purpose RF record and playback,” commented Brendan Wolfe, director of market development for Averna. “We’ve been working very closely with the NI teams to bring this innovative solution to market, and we expect great success from this solution partnership.”
RF Studio for the USRP can record and play back real-world RF signals, up to 40 MHz wide; capture actual RF spectrum, including FM, DAB, GPS, GLONASS, and cellular; and visualize and record weak signals with its Noise Figure view. It offers advanced signal analysis with the Spectrum, Histogram, and Power views. Simple RF-chain configuration tools can help quickly detect and set up the recording environment. The DriveView option logs video, audio, and NMEA data while RF is recorded.
“The combination of RF Studio and the USRP provides a flexible, affordable solution for RF record and playback. Now in addition to prototyping wireless communications systems in LabVIEW, users can test them by reproducing realistic RF environments in the lab,” said Erik Luther, wireless communications group manager for National Instruments.