Pilot tone aided measurements to extend the bandwidth of radio frequency applications

Abstract

A technique to extend the effective measurement bandwidth of a non-coherent vector receiver is presented. This bandwidth extension technique relies on the use of a pilot signal (known a priori), which is added on the signal of interest and is measured in a single receiver. Compared to other bandwidth extension techniques referred as stitching techniques, the proposed approach avoids error propagation in the measurement bandwidth and simultaneously enables the measurement of signals that do not contain energy in certain spectral bands. The pilot signal is created in digital stages, which tackles to large extent the requirement of the a priori knowledge of this signal. Further, the pilot signal is designed to minimize estimation errors of the proposed technique, providing enhanced performance. It is analytically shown that the error incurred by the proposed method is always lower than the error from the measurement noise. Measurement results show the method functionality with an error in the range of -50 dB of the signal measured. Finally, the usefulness of the proposed technique is illustrated by measuring the input and output of an amplifier with dynamic range in excess of 80 dB over 290 MHz using an 18 MHz bandwidth receiver. This measurement could not have been performed by existing stitching techniques. © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.