RF Engineering for Wireless Networks

Appendix 2 Measurement Tools

1. The RF Toolbox

There are four tools that are somewhere between useful and indispensable for working with RF signals in communications applications: spectrum analyzers, network analyzers, signal generators, and vector signal analyzers.

A spectrum analyzer is just a radio with a screen. It has a local oscillator to convert the incoming RF signal to an intermediate frequency signal, which is filtered and then applied to a detector to generate a voltage corresponding to the power in the received bandwidth (Figure A2-1). By ramping the frequency in time, the screen displays a picture of the power spectral density (power in a given frequency range) of the signal received by the analyzer. Spectrum analyzers are used ...