Rapidly advancing technologies and emerging threats are driving increased investment in modern test and measurement tools.
Military and aerospace organizations focus on building readiness and filling capability gaps to ensure multi-domain superiority across land, air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Test and measurement equipment plays a key role in achieving these goals, and is the focus of widespread modernization efforts.
The growing complexity and demand for multifunctional, multi-mission capabilities in modern aerospace and defense electronics can result in conflicting system requirements as well as test and measure challenges.
It pushes systems designers toward integrated systems, says David Njuguna, technical marketing manager at Tektronix in Beaverton, Ore. Defense organizations today are deploying “integrated systems for communication, visualization, and threat detection and management, which are enabled by a distributed network of low-cost, low size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP) sensors designed purely for detection, coupled with high-performance analyzers for deeper exploration and decision-making,” he says. Systems supporting these defense trends require broad frequency range, wide instantaneous bandwidth, and real-time streaming and processing capabilities.
“Although the systems supporting these defense trends have some common requirements, including real-time streaming and processing capabilities, they also have some diverging requirements,” Njuguna says. The distributed networks require low SWaP and low cost while still maintaining signal fidelity, and the performance receiver/analyzer requires higher resolution, wider instantaneous bandwidth, and deeper capture memory, including more powerful real-time processing capabilities.