RF and Communications Test

Engineers involved in wireless design and test are facing the increase of wireless subsystem integration into larger designs. The LabVIEW RF and communications test platform meets this challenge with a modular, commercial off-the-shelf approach to hardware driven by flexible, intuitive LabVIEW graphical programming, NI PXI modular instruments, and traditional stand-alone instruments.

You can use NI LabVIEW add-ons for RF and communications test, including the Modulation Toolkit and the Spectral Measurements Toolkit, to synthesize digital and baseband analog test signals, with channel coding, digital/analog modulation, and impairments. In addition, you can apply robust signal processing to calculate power in band, adjacent channel power, bit error rate, modulation error ratio (MER), and many other RF / communications related measurements.

National Instruments also offers several PXI-based modular instruments that allow you to transmit and receive into the GHz frequency range. The NI 5660 RF vector signal analyzers and NI 5671 vector signal generators offer a frequency range up to 2.7 GHz, wide real-time bandwidth, and a highly stable OCXO timebase. Using LabVIEW graphical programming, you can easily write custom software to control these PXI-based modular instruments and generate and acquire RF test signals. You also can use LabVIEW with traditional stand-alone instruments for RF and communications test.