What Is Digital Demodulation?
Digital demodulation is a process that extracts the original signal from a modulated RF carrier signal using a receiver and digital signal processing (DSP) techniques. This allows users to recover important information from the modulated carrier wave that can be used to analyze signal quality and transmitter performance. Digital demodulation combines spectrum analysis, software-defined radios (SDR), and DSP to enable modern wireless signal analysis.
Digital Demodulation Mode in Spike
Let’s dive into the digital demodulation feature in Spike. Digital demodulation is a mode in Spike that allows users to measure modulation qualities such as EVM magnitude and phase error and to characterize impairments such as IQ offset, amplitude droop and group delay via equalization filters.
Gain insight into your signals using Spike’s digital modulation tools. You can analyze transmissions with push button demodulation of a variety of digital modulations common in cellular communications, machine to machine, and other radio applications like PSK, QAM, ASK, FSK, and custom constellation patterns using several standard filter types.
You can also measure signal quality with an array of RF performance metrics:
- Find signal to noise ratio (SNR)
- Assess modulation quality with error vector magnitude (EVM)
- Characterize impairments with IQ offset, amplitude droop, and group delay via equalization filters
- Pattern match on a preamble or other given sequence of bits with configurable search length and offset
- Use adaptive equalization to remove linear effects and impairments over the measurement channels such as fading, multipath, reflections, and those produced by the system components such as filters and amplifiers
Digital demodulation is a feature in Spike that turns your Signal Hound spectrum analyzer into a vector signal analyzer. That allows you to perform EVM measurements and view complex plots for any number of PSK/QAM digital modulations.
Digital demodulation is just one of the many Spike features that enable users to make advanced RF measurements and analyze a wide range of signals. Spike is the perfect application for powerful and affordable RF analysis. Learn more at https://signalhound.com/spike/.
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