Wideband compressive receiver with SAW convolver

We present a system for fast chirp-transform spectrum analysis for spectrum monitoring of frequency hopped spread spectrum signals or for spectrometry in chemistry etc. An elastic SAW convolver is used for fast realtime signal processing with high time-bandwidth product (TB). Using a convolver with TB=2650 we achieve a resolution of 125 kHz over 80 MHz bandwidth. The implementation of the presented system required some new concepts for the generation of the RF signals and weighting. The system showed satisfactory performance over a wide range of realtime signal analysis applications.