Intelligent RF spectrum recorder eliminates manual monitoring

Technology News | October 13, 2020

By Jean-Pierre Joosting

Novator Solutions has announced the ODEN 3001 an intelligent RF spectrum recorder with 765 MHz real-time bandwidth. The spectrum recorder automatically records 1024 individual signals for after-event analysis, characterization, or archiving. All triggered signals are processed simultaneously and stored in dedicated files which reduces the time and involved cost until the data can be further processed.

The new intelligent recording approach is ideal for signal surveillance applications such as COMINT, ELINT or ITU Spectrum Management eliminating the need for operators to monitor and record unknown signals manually.

Another area is within SATCOM, broadcasting, test and ITU spectrum monitoring which have common requirements to record interfering signals to eliminate unwanted emitters or to take other corrective actions.

“It has been a real challenge to put the different technologies into a new system level design providing new and improved ways to capture and record unknown energy events”, says Anders Svensson, CTO Novator Solutions.

ODEN will be available starting end of this year. It covers 16 kHz to 14-GHz/26.5-GHz with 765 MHz instantaneous bandwidth (IBW). It provides 128 digital downconverters (DDCs) for the entire IBW. A 1024 DDC option for 200 MHz IBW will be available as well.

The system can be ordered with both in-chassis and external RAID hardware including enterprise class disks with standard configurations form 4TB – 184TB.

Carsten Watolla, Department & Product Manager, Spectral Data Analysis, explains “The combination of a high resolution frequency mask trigger (FMT) with 128/1024 individual DDCs and a new concept with acquisition regions and rules provides a new level of freedom to configure sub frequency bands of interest within the real-time bandwidth. It reduces the amount of data to be stored and processed to a level which hasn’t been possible with conventional data reduction techniques.