Have you ever been sitting at your desk wishing that you did not have to go out to a tester and hook up a spectrum analyzer to understand some unexpected behavior? Even worse, get on a plane or find someone remotely to connect it for you. What if the tester could measure a spectrum up to the bandwidth of the RF instrument in use? In this paper, a method for producing a plot showing the spectrum of a DUT output using and UltraWave8G or UltraWave24G will be presented.

The receivers on these UltraFLEXplus instruments can support bandwidths of up to 400 MHz; however, by taking multiple captures with different LO frequencies and stitching them together, the user can create a composite wide band spectrum up to the bandwidth of the instrument in use.

Should the user decide to use this method in test time critical environment, the UltraFLEXplus PACE architecture and DSP backgrounding can be implemented to optimize test time while still making wideband measurements.

In this paper, the authors will present the theory behind this method, walk through some example code and its implementation, and give an example use case that can be easily adopted to your needs.