Tektronix RSA306 USB Spectrum Analyzer

Its possible to do a "measure the wave length" experiment or a simple radar experiment though

This is a nifty piece of equipment and has more uses than playdoh.

Awww, ok. I thought for a second it would be a neat waveguide simulation, but open pit is different.

It's a pit mine so usually it's loose dirt, but then there are also machines, buildings, rock walls and areas that haven't been blasted yet, so it can vary quite a bit.

Is it rough wall or that concrete finish stuff?

Awesome. It would be interesting to see how this works in analyzing long range WiFi signals like we use in mines. Much of it is 2.4 and 4.9 GHz and none of the equipment I currently have can measure in that range. Besides that, a mine being such an oddly shaped and huge space with (potentially) lots of other signals and noise, there is really no way to calculate how good your signal will be without measuring.

I stand corrected. There is a whip antenna included along with the USB 3.0 cable and manual and everything. It can capture signals with -65Bm of total power and the spurious noise floor mentioned is a worst case one which means even with that whip antenna, you can do a lot of in field work. For more directional stuff, you can fashion your own antenna and if you are doing on the bench analysis, you can use your existing wave guides. Just make sure your synth/amplifier does not go beyond 15dB/20dB. In such a case you should use an attenuator which is usually accompanied by the synth.

EDIT: The SFDR is 55db buts its a worst case figure.

So there don't have any adaptator and antenna?

Shabaz sir,

I think they have a driver for MATLAB in the instrumentation toolbox. That's good since we can implement some other stuff like BER counter and test modulatiin scheme performance in the field and related the effect with various types of noise. I may be wrong though...

Whip antenna is not included I think though...

That's a really good question. I was hoping the whip antenna would be included as well (as pictured), but it does not seem to be a standard accessory.

Do you know if there have an adaptor Type N to sma?

Cant wait to get my hands on this thing! So many great ideas to explore! What a great addition to my bench!

Product video updated.  Apologies for the inconvenience.

Happy Holidays to you as well Christian and thank you again for another great road test!

I just checked out http://www.tek.com/signalvu-pc-rsa306 which seems to have some rather encouraging news that there are indeed 30-day trials of the options available ... so at least you can test them out before buying them.

The instructions for activating it from the Instructions document are:

Activating Evaluation Mode

--------------------------

SignalVu-PC has an evaluation mode that allows you to use SignalVu-PC for 30 days.

To activate the evaluation mode in SignalVu-PC:

1. Launch SignalVu-PC. Select Tools/Manage Licenses...

2. Select a software option and select 'Start 30-day evaluation'.

- The Current Status box will change to display the number of days remaining

for evaluation. Repeat this procedure for each of the SignalVu-PC options you

wish to evaluate.

3. To verify that the demo has started, select Tools > Manage Licenses. This will

display the License Management window.

4. From the Option drop-down list, select the option for which you wish to verify evaluation

has been enabled. Check the Current Status box. When demo mode has been enabled, the

current Status box will display Evaluation (XX days remaining).

Hi Clem!

Although not free, for home use they have a home edition which is low cost. The only slight problem is that often you need toolboxes, so the cost does slowly add up. I've probably purchased half a dozen toolboxes. But, it is a lot cheaper than the commercial version.

An alternative (free) is GNU octave, but eventually you'll likely want MATLAB if you find yourself using Octave long enough. It is possible to interface Octave with test equipment (see here for an example), but it is not as straightforward. Still, it is useful for when you want to automate, or if you want to further process data.

Any MATLAB documentation? Is it free download?

Thanks,

Clem

I don't know, but with other Techtronix spectrum analysers I've seen the support in MATLAB is pretty smooth using the Instrument Control Toolbox. So if I get to try this that's probably what I'll use for further analysis. It has all the functionality you could want, you just need to do a bit of programming.

Given they've been so generous already, I'm not sure but I'll be guessing it might be a no ... Would be incredibly sweet if we could have one or two above the base software ...

That being said, I'd be very interested in the answer - after all, the Wi-Fi ones would come in very handy for site surveys and interference detection/logging. It would be rather interesting, given the 40Mhz bandwidth of the analyzer, how it might perform with Wireless 802.11ac signals which have 80 and 160Mhz modes. As a bit of a radio person, the P25 and mapping options would be handy for professionals installing/drive-testing APCO P25 radio systems (like the Government Radio Network in NSW, Australia). The pulse testing could work well for radar systems.

Question:

Will options for Signal-Vu be included like SVA?

Thanks,

Clem