RF Power and SWR Measurement

[GrayFrierson]

First of all - I am an NI/LabView etc virgin.

I am tasked with creating an appliance that will take the output of two USB connected Peak/Average RF Power sensors such as Agilent, Anritsu, Rohde & Schwartz etc and calculating the forward average power, reflected average power and average SWR and peak forward power.  I need to be able to access the appliance via the internet to read these values.  And I need to generate a hard dry closure whenever the SWR or peak power exceeds a configurable value.  This closure should probably be gated by a configurable minimum forward power so as not to give galse alarms when the monitored system is turned off.

The appliance is used to provide protection to several high power transmitters against defects in the transmission/antenna system.  It should be able to auto start and recover from power failures without intervention or false alarms and should be fairly well hardened against silly OS failures.

I am looking first for the general approach - i.e, what sort of NI hardware will I need to gather data from the RF sensors and generate the closure(s) and what is the best NI software to use to implement this.  Are there any particular RF sensors for which there is a body of existing software that I can crib.  Once I have this info and can get into understanding the hardware/software, I am sure I will have further questions, but, for now, I need a starting point and overview.

Thanks!

Gray

[Wan-L]

Hello,

If you need recommendations for building a test system, the best thing to do is contact your local sales rep directly. http://us.ni.com/contacts