Beamforming by NI Cards

[Shehzad]

I want to know that is there any application note of beamforming by any of NI Cards

[DFGray]

Please give us more details. What do you mean by beamforming? As a former laser engineer, I interpret this to mean laser beam forming. But there are a lot of other types of beams out there.

[Shehzad]

Dear,

   Analogue signals are coming out from an array of eight antennas and that has to be digitized by the board and then analyzed. The signal frequency is in the range of 26 MHz.

I want to know that is there any NI card capable of doing this and i also want some application note on Beamforming done by any of NI baord.

[DFGray]

NI makes a large range of digitizers and RF products that will work in your signal range. Unfortunately, I could not find an application note on beam forming using NI products. By searching for "phased array", I found several hits, but no application notes, so others are using NI products for this type of application. Sorry I cannot help you more.

[Matthew_W]

 
 Hi Shehzad,

 Can you talk a little bit more about your application?

 Is your signal of interest centered at 26Mhz? Or is the symbol rate 26Mhz with the signal at baseband?
 
 I understand your application to be taking the RF output from the antenna's, before any receiver, digitizing the RF band of interest then analyzing it. Is this correct?

 I would recommend looking at a PXI-5142 and the Spectral Measurement Toolkit.
 
 The NI 5142 has Onboard Signal Processing, this means you will only stream I &Q data to your computer. Without OSP you will be streaming the entire bandwidth to your computer. This could be the difference between 4MB/s and 100MB/s for the same signal information. The Spectral Measurement Toolkit provides power measurements, analog demodulation, spectrum peak search, etc.

 More information about OSP here.

 Have a great afternoon.

 Best regards,
 
 MatthewW
 Applications Engineer
 National Instruments