Giga-tronics Incorporated has announced the immediate availability of a wide bandwidth RF Playback solution specifically designed for military electronic applications. The fully integrated system is part of the Company’s COMPASS platform (Coherent Multi-Channel Playback Acquisition Streaming System) and incorporates state-of-the-art Digital and RF/Microwave technology for use in the design, verification and operational validation of modern Radar and Electronic Warfare systems.
This configuration of the Giga-tronics COMPASS architecture utilizes two 16-bit dual-DAC cards running at 4.8 Gigasamples/second (GSpS) integrated within a high-performance 4U height 19” width rack-mountable PC workstation driving the Company’s microwave upconverters to deliver four phase-coherent channels of analog RF. The resulting RF signals exhibit superior spectral purity, phase noise, and frequency tuning resolution across the entire Radar and EW spectrum.
Each channel can support the playback of either synthesized or previously digitized (captured) signals with up to 2 GHz of instantaneous bandwidth (IBW) directly from the DAC cards and up to 1 GHz of IBW at RF frequencies to 20 GHz. To facilitate the analysis of advanced Electronic Attack (EA) and Electronic Protection (EP) techniques on a variety of tactical Radar and EW platforms and programs, it is also possible to present the RF playback at any center frequency between 0-20 GHz while maintaining the original spectral content and time/bandwidth parameters as the original regardless of it being synthetic or from what system it may have been captured on if not on COMPASS itself. The end-to-end RF capture/RF playback loop of COMPASS has superior Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and Dynamic Range to provide the fidelity critical to the proper testing and evaluation of these tactical platforms.
In addition, outstanding timing synchronization between channels is achieved through the use of carefully designed clock generation/distribution and triggering circuits providing worst case 200ps skew from one channel to any other. This is critical for supporting the development of coherent EA, DRFM-based Jammers, and Angle-Of-Arrival (AOA)/Direction Finding (DF) techniques used in modern EW systems.
COMPASS RF Capture & Playback combination systems can be configured with up to 64 Terabytes of solid-state disk storage permitting uninterrupted playback times per channel ranging from several hours to a full 24-hour day thanks to the system’s variable sample rate feature. The Giga-tronics COMPASS can playback greater than 7.4 hours per channel when running at its maximum sample rate. For even greater durations, RF Capture-only COMPASS configurations can be configured with up to 192TB of total storage capacity.
The modular architecture offers scalability from one to four channels with the ability to repurpose the same Digital and RF/Microwave base assets in the future between capture and playback or combinations of both functions. Rack-mounted solutions for a lab environment and rugged transit case options for field or range use are available.
Giga-tronics will continue to deliver state-of-the-art capability within the COMPASS platform to support all levels of System Design, Development, Verification, Validation and Operational testing of Radar and EW systems.
