Policing the airwaves

Product: FFT spectrum    analyzer
TI DSP: TMS320C6000
Third party: Central    Research Laboratories
Success achieved:    Maximum performance    in fast Fourier    transforms enabling    multichannel radio    spectrum analysis.

The rapid growth in radio communications and high-speed networks has forced a wide range of governmental and private organizations to analyze fleeting signals across a broad bandwidth. New high-performance DSPs such as the TMS320C6000 have enabled hardware and software systems that can vastly reduce the cost of this signal analysis. Central Research Laboratories (CRL) has had a long experience in the design and construction of such systems.

The standard narrowband signal analysis process is the fast Fourier transform (FFT), which serves as a filter bank showing the channels of the frequency band that contain energy. The output of these channels can then be processed to reveal signal details and demodulate the contained information.

The ’C6000 has the ability to perform a 1000-point FFT in 66 ms — the equivalent of listening to nearly all the AM or FM radio channels simultaneously and continuously in order not to miss the shortest radio transmission or interference burst.

CRL has made maximum use of this performance by designing a system with four ’C6000 DSPs. CRL’s system can analyze each or all of the spectrum channels with four independent FFT processes. In addition, the processes can be used to search for any type of narrowband or moving narrowband signals, including radar, communications, security, EMC, medical image processing, ionospheric sounding and transient interference-chasing applications.