Strategies For Signal Intelligence: From Antennas To Analysis

Overview

Signal intelligence describes a broad range of applications ranging from communications jamming, packet sniffing, and identification of interference or pirating signals. While this article will discuss many of the specific needs for each application, it will primarily focus on the techniques required to analyze intermittent or "bursty" RF signals. As we will observe, signal intelligence applications often require sophisticated and highly customized signal processing methods to characterize the power, frequency, and phase of interference signals over long periods of time.

Introduction

In many scenarios, the traditional approach to signal intelligence using benchtop vector signal analyzers and spectrum analyzers is insufficient because of the limited acquisition sizes of these instruments. However, recent innovations in the PC industry such as the PCI Express bus and improved hard drive disk speeds enable PXI instruments to be used in RF stream-to-disk systems using off-the-shelf instrumentation. In fact, today's PXI-based RF stream-to-disk solutions enable the recording time-continuous RF bandwidth at frequencies up to 2.7 GHz. In a typical system, a 2 Terabyte RAID (redundant array of independent disks) system enables you to stream up to 20 MHz of RF bandwidth to disk for five hours or more.