Analog-to-information converters in the wideband RF measurement for aerospace applications: current situation and perspectives

Finding new data acquisition methods for practical instrumentation development which can be used in case of monitoring purposes of aerospace RF spectrum are a key research area nowadays. With the increasing evolution of the signal bandwidths, the requirements for new acquisition capabilities are a necessity for modern aerospace RF measurement instrumentation systems. In particular, an overview of the current trends for wideband RF instrumentation has focused on the signal acquisition stages of the instruments. The most frequent RF signal acquisition architectures and also some research trends in designing of new systems, such as AIC based wideband RF spectrum acquisition, have been presented. In the case of AIC, it could be assumed that this unique combination of hardware and software offers a powerful method for the acquisition of wideband RF signals. Although no off-the-shelf device is available already, a lot of research is currently being carried out and some prototypes have been proposed. Issues such as: utilization of CS mathematic methods and acquisition hardware for real-time RF spectrum monitoring; reducing substantially the size, the analog RF front-end complexity and the power consumption by applying the CS framework; and providing a good RF signal spectrum estimation by using CS techniques, still remain open to the research community in the field.