National Instruments Chassis and Vector Signal Transceivers

Access

System is named Instrument1, running embedded windows. Access via remote desktop. Currently using the secure login credentials.

Roles

Replacing the old instrument1 machine. Acting as host for interference service, and using two onboard VSTs for noise injection, arbitrary signal injection, and spectrum monitoring, in order of importance.

Also acting as host for communication with spectrum analyzer, and other GPIB instruments.

Will eventually host similar capabilities for LTE and WLAN signal generation and analysis.

Ultimately, we want to provide labview access to end users, but we need to ensure a return to consistent state first.

Software

Code is written in C#, LabVIEW is available but not currently in use.

NI provides .net wrappers for their DLLs.

• NI-RFSG (signal generation)
• NI-RFSA (signal analysis)
• NI-RFmx
• LTE Toolkit - Generation
• LTE Toolkit - Analysis
• WLAN Toolkit - Generation
• WLAN Toolkit - Analysis

Hardware

1. Onboard
   1. NI PXIe Chassis
   2. NI embedded controller 8135
   3. NI VST 5646R "RIO0"
   4. NI VST 5646R "RIO1"
2. Network
   1. Agilent measurement switch (controls RF switches for antennas) mswitch1
   2. GPIB over network device (connects to signal analyzer) gpib1

Update 04/20/17

Our main desired feature is AWGN generation, at some specified power level, bandwidth, and center frequency. Unfortunately, NI-RFSG does not support this natively. Instead, we must build a RFSG driver extension, to add the capability to the existing FPGA image.

Building FPGA images is not supported under windows 10, due to xilinx depreciating the ISE toolkit. We can run such programs, if the bitfiles are compiled elsewhere.

As a short stop, we have created a labview VI that pre-generates appropriate noise, and replays it in a loop, of duration 0.1 second. This will properly interfere with things, but will not be properly uncorrelated.

Current roadblock for streaming: RFSG driver extension requires RFSG source code, which is only available through labview beta program. Link is currently broken, must ask NI support how to continue.

New architecture

4 antennas, each with amplifier. Short term, these 4 will be fed by a 4 way splitter, from one VST output. Longer term, we would like to have a 2 input, 4 output attenuator matrix, to use both outputs simultaneously.