In many scenarios, the traditional approach to signals intelligence using benchtop vector signal analyzers and spectrum analyzers is insufficient because of the limited acquisition sizes of these instruments. However, with recent innovations in the PC industry such as the PCI Express bus and improved hard drive disk speeds, you can use PXI instruments in RF stream-to-disk systems with off-the-shelf instrumentation. In fact, today’s PXI-based RF stream-to-disk solutions enable the recording of time-continuous RF bandwidth at frequencies up to 2.7 GHz.
Typically, a 2 TB RAID (redundant array of independent disks) system helps you stream up to 20 MHz of RF bandwidth to disk for five hours or more. This paper does not discuss RF stream-to-disk system technologies, but you can learn more about them with these RF record and playback resources.