Testing commercial & military RF systems with PXI instrumentation modules

Successful deployment of modern commercial and military RF systems requires test systems configured to process and measure a wide range of system characteristics and errors. PCIbus extensions for instrumentation, PXI, is a proven architecture for supporting a wide variety of test applications, but, until recently it has lacked modules with sufficient bandwidth and processing power to adequately test RF systems. New, PXI modules from ZTEC Instruments overcome this limitation, encompassing a complete suite of RF/IF test modules. This paper describes various combinations of these off-the-shelf suite of RF test modules that can be used to make signal-to-noise power measurements, diagnose modulation problems, integrate time and position measurements, characterize frequency agile radar systems, and make network path delay measurements.