Boonton 4500C 30 MHz to 40 GHz Peak Power Analyzer

The Boonton Model 4500C is the instrument of choice for capturing, displaying, analyzing and characterizing micro- wave and RF power in both the time and statistical domains. It is ideal for design, verification, and troubleshooting of pulsed and noise-like signals used in commercial and military radar, electronic warfare (EW), wireless communications (e.g., LTE, LTE-A, and 5G), and consumer electronics (WLAN), as well as education and research applications.

The 4500C features 100 ps time base resolution, video band- width up to 125 MHz, flexible triggering and greater than 80 dB dynamic range without any range switching to cover the most demanding peak power measurement applications. The 4500C also features continuous statistical analysis of power at acquisition rates up to 100 MegaSamples per second (MS/s), a text display of up to 15 automatic measure- ments per channel, as well as envelope and persistence views to provide fast, in-depth signal analysis. The instrument incorporates convenient I/O, including USB ports for storing data such as instrument setups, trace waveforms and bitmap image files.

Real-Time Power Processing™

Boonton Real-Time Power Processing™ dramatically reduces the total cycle time for acquiring and processing power measurement samples. By combining a dedicated acquisition engine, hardware trigger, integrated sample buffer, and a real-time optimized parallel processing architecture, Real-Time Power Processing™ performs most of the sweep processing steps simultaneously, beginning immediately after the trigger instead of waiting for the end of the acquisition cycle.

The advantages of the Real-Time Power Processing technique are shown in Figure 1a. Key processing steps take place in parallel and keep pace with the signal acquisition. With no added computational overhead to prolong the sweep cycle, the sample buffer cannot overflow. As a result, there is no need to halt acquisition for trace processing. This means gap-free signal acquisition virtually guarantees that intermittent signal phenomena such as transients, dropouts, or interference will be reliably captured and analyzed. These sorts of events are most often missed by conventional power meters due to the acquisition gaps while processing takes place, shown in Figure 1b.

Figure 1a. Comparison between conventional power measurement sample processing and Real-Time Power Processing™.	Figure 1b. Conventional power measurement misses key information and events while processing samples.

Unique Trigger System

The 4500C features a unique trigger system that allows users to qualify the trigger on a specific event or a specific delay time. This allows a user-selected pulse to be captured, even when its timing is variable.

The B trigger qualifier with resolution <100 ps eliminates problematic synchronization issues associated with time jitter within pulse bursts – often found in UWB and radar applications. This qualifier may be setup to 999,999 events or up to 1 second.

Superior Time Management

The 4500C features 100 ps time base resolution and with an acquisition rate up to 100 MS/s, can provide 50 points per division with a time base range as low as 5 ns / division. This enables users to see meaningful waveform information (Figure 3a) missed by alternative power analyzers (Figure 3b).

In addition, Boonton’s superior time management enables several other advantages. Pulse widths as narrow as 6 ns can be captured and characterized. The 4500C can also allow users to analyze long waveforms, whether a long pulse train or shorter waveforms over more repetitions. With a viewing range up to 10 hours, users can monitor for temporal behavior such as amplifier droop as it heats up.

Figure 3a. Waveform analysis with time 10 ns/div time base  and 50 samples per division.	Figure 3b. Waveform analysis with time 10 ns/div time base and 1 sample per division.

Powerful Statistical Analysis

The 4500C features optional probability density functions (PDF) and cumulative distribution functions (CDF, CCDF) to accurately characterize noise-like RF, such as OFDM and WLAN signals. These statistical functions build and analyze a very large population of power samples continuously or triggered at a 100 MS/s acquisition rate on all channels simultaneously.

These functions are fast, accurate and allow the measurement of very infrequent power peaks for a user-defined popu- lation size or acquisition interval. Although the programmable acquisition time can be very long or continuous, even short runs can resolve very low probabilities, due to the extremely high sample throughput.