caseSTUDY: TCS012

Claude SweetonSr. Sales EngineerTEVET

CUSTOMER: US Army CERDEC I2WD and CACISOW: W15P7T-10-D-D413

CASE STUDYUS Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development, and Engineering Center (CERDEC) Intelligence & Information Warfare Directorate (I2WD) at Aberdeen Proving Grounds develops and evaluates Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) programs and systems to provide today’s warfighter a competitive advantage on the battlefield. Two of the most prevalent threats faced come from Electronic Warfare (EW) and cyber-attacks. CERDEC awarded an Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) with CACI (a top 10 Fed Prime Contractor) for their Rapid Response Third Generation (R2-G3) program.

Under the program, CACI engineers will provide its Development, Engineering, and Protection Services (DEPS) support to help I2WD secure air and ground platforms against EW and cyber-attacks and assist in developing countermeasures.

Being at the forefront of the US Army’s R&D efforts requires the availability of the latest test instrumentation. In addition, these test instruments require the flexibility to meet today’s requirements and to have the ability to easily adapt for future test applications.

US Army CERDEC / CACI – NI PXIe-5665 Vector Signal Analyzer

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Electronic Test & Measurement Equipment | Life Sciences & Chemical Analysis Products | e-Commerce Catalog and B2B Solutions

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CURRENT APPLICATION

CERDEC and CACI required three Vector Signal Analyzers (VSAs) to enable them to easily analyze complex RF waveforms in their test application. The three VSAs needed to:

• Analyze Uplink frequencies in the Ku Band – to 14GHz

• Occupy a small footprint within their test environment

• Offer intuitive RF software for characterization of complex RF signalswith a visual programming language for ease-of-use.

TEVET SOLUTIONTEVET engaged directly with the engineering teams from CERDEC and CACI at Aberdeen Proving Grounds to gain a full understanding of the application and the test challenges they were faced with. TEVET conducted a full gap analysis to gain further insight to what was required for not only today’s need, but also future capabilities the customers may have. Determining factors of the gap analysis for identifying the best COTS solution included: selecting a high performance Vector Signal Analyzer (VSA) that met all the current required specification and selecting an instrument provider that offered a leading technology platform for future requirements. In addition to meeting today’s need, we found that National Instruments’ PXIe-5665 VSA along with their extensive offering of PXI hardware and LabVIEW software products was the best possible offering for future R&D requirement.

NI PXIe-5665 14GHz Vector Signal Analyzer

NI PXIe-5665 14GHz VSA is comprised of:

• NI PXIe-5605 RF Downconverter• NI PXIe-5622 IF Digitizer• NI PXIe-5663 Synth/LO Source

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Key Features:• RF Bandwidth 20Hz to 14GHz• Analysis Bandwidth 50MHz• -165dBm/Hz Average Noise Floor• ±0.1dB Typical Amplitude Accuracy• 16bit ADC• Fast Measurement Speed• RF List Mode• RF Record and Playback capability

Ex: 33-hours record time at 50MHz using NI HDD-8266 24TB RAID enclosure.

• Peer-to-Peer Streaming capability• Flexible Software• Sync four or more NI PXIe-5665’s for MIMO Phase-Coherent Analysis

NI PXIe-5665 using RFSA Soft Front Panel SWThe NI RFSA Soft Front Panel helps you quickly view and analyze RF signals us-ing PXI hardware from National Instruments. The soft front panel features built-in measurements such as third-order intercept (TOI), complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF), adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR), occupied bandwidth (OBW), channel power, and transmit power. With these one-button measurements, you can quickly measure, display, and store results which makes NI PXI instruments ideal for characterization and validation environments.

Electronic Test & Measurement Equipment | Life Sciences & Chemical Analysis Products | e-Commerce Catalog and B2B Solutions

SDVOSB & HUBZone Small Business

NI LabVIEW Initially released in 1986. Today, it is the most widely used test software in the world. LabVIEW is a system-designed platform and development environment with a visual programming language.

LabVIEW is deployed in many US Military test applications. It addresses critical concerns faced by the US Military:

• Ease-of-Use – With its basic visual programming language and NI’s extensive training and support, no test software is easier to use.

• Flexibility – LabVIEW allows the end-user to control multiple instruments from hundreds of OEMs.

• Obsolescence – In use for 30 years, and providing drivers for other OEM test instrumentation, LabVIEW is the ideal programming language to standardize on.