Spectro™ VSA

Today’s Vector Signal Analyzers (VSAs) are used commonly to characterize the performance of a variety of transmitted and modulated signals. Such measurements are designed to determine the quality of modulation and are used for design validation or compliance testing of electronic devices and systems.

Common VSA measurements include a range of in-channel measurements, such as error vector magnitude, code domain power, or spectral flatness, on known signals. Other VSA applications include the ability to demodulate communication signals, such as W-CDMA, LTE, and WLAN. But conventional VSA display methods can often mask critical system performance.

Constant Wave’s Spectro™ VSA software allows engineers to accurately characterize the performance of a range of waveforms. When used with popular high-performance Vector Signal Analyzers, Constant Wave’s technology yields more accurate measurements and less uncertainty across frequency and time.

Joint Time-Frequency Analysis

Constant Wave’s unique spectrographic analysis presents the characteristics of signals in both the time domain and frequency domain simultaneously. Unlike traditional VSA display methods, which can mask response characteristics, Spectro VSA lets you select and observe the response of your device at any specific time or frequency.

With Spectro VSA, engineers can:

• Produce high-quality spectrogram images generated with “High Definition” signal processing.
• Visualize signal characteristics in three dimensions – time, frequency and amplitude.
• Drill down into trouble spots, extracting IQ signals from any fragment of time-frequency space.
• Find which signal characteristics are causing spectral regrowth problems.
• Save time and money by identifying signal problems quickly.

This image shows clearly the spectral regrowth at the output of a non-linear W-CDMA amplifier. A dynamic workspace, the spectrogram shows complex performance data across frequency (x-axis) and time (y-axis). The color indicates the magnitude of the waveform, with warmer colors indicating higher magnitude (red and orange) and cooler colors indicating lower magnitude (blue, purple, and black).

System Requirements

• Runs on Windows®-based PCs under XP, Vista or system 7.
• Compatible with Agilent® EXA and MXA (more products are being added).