Boonton 4530 Peak Power Meter User Manual - Manual (Page 15)

Boonton Electronics Chapter 1
4530 Series RF Power Meter General Information
1-1
1. GENERAL INFORMATION
1.1 DESCRIPTION
The 4530 Series RF Power Meter is a new generation of instruments. It allows high-resolution power measurement of
a wide range of CW and modulated RF signals over a dynamic range of up to 90dB depending on sensor. The power
meter is available configured as the single-channel Model 4531, or as the dual-channel Model 4532. For the remainder
of this manual, the series designation of 4530 will be used to indicate either model, except when otherwise stated.
The 4530 is really several instruments in one, and can function as a CW Power Meter, a Peak Power Meter, a Statistical
Power Analyzer, and an RF Voltmeter. It accepts the full series of Boonton RF power and voltage sensors, which
includes coaxial dual-diode sensors and thermal sensors. Sensor data and calibration information is automatically
downloaded from the sensor or “smart adapter” whenever a new sensor is connected, eliminating the need to manually
enter calibration factors.
When used as a CW power meter, the 4530 provides seamless measurement performance due to the extremely wide
dynamic range of its input stage. Thermal and peak power sensors require no range switching under any conditions,
and even CW diode sensors spanning a 90dB dynamic range require only two widely overlapping ranges. This means
that practically any measurement can be performed without the interruptions and non-linearities associated with the
range changes of conventional power meters. , the 4530 provides seamless measurement performance due to the extremely wide
For modulated signals, the 4530 can make accurate average and peak power measurements with modulation band-
widths as high as 20MHz, making it ideal for high-speed digitally modulated carriers such as CDMA, W-CDMA, GSM,
TDMA, HDTV and UMT. Periodic and pulse waveforms can be displayed in graphical format, and a host of automatic
measurements are available which characterize the time and power profiles of the pulse. Effective sampling rates up to
50MSa/sec and user programmable cursors allow instantaneous power measurements at precise time delays from the
pulse edge or an external trigger as well as time gated or power gated peak and average power.
For spread-spectrum or randomly modulated signals such as CDMA, the 4530’s powerful statistical analysis mode
allows full profiling of the power probability at all signal levels. Sustained acquisition rates in excess of one million
readings per second along with rangeless operation insure that a representative population can be acquired and
analyzed in minimum time. By analyzing the probability of occurrence of power levels approaching the absolute peak
power, it is possible to characterize the occasional power peaks that result in amplifier compression and data errors.
Because of the random and very infrequent nature of these events, they are next to impossible to spot with the
conventional techniques used in other universal power meters. In addition, the instrument’s extremely wide video
bandwidth insures that even the fastest peaks will be accurately measured.
The 4530’s powerful dual-processor architecture permits advanced measurement capabilities with unprecedented
speed and performance. A high-speed, floating-point digital signal processor (DSP) performs the measurements. It
gathers and processes the power samples from the sensors, performs time-stamping, linearity correction, gain adjust-
ment and filtering, all in fractions of a microsecond. The processed measurements are then passed to a dedicated,
32-bit I/O processor that monitors the keyboard, updates the LCD display and responds to RS-232 and GPIB requests
for formatted measurements. This design eliminates the speed tradeoffs between measurement data input (acquisition)
and output (over the GPIB) that are so common among other power meters.
Instrument operating firmware is stored in flash memory that may be field reprogrammed with any PC via the onboard
RS-232 port. Free firmware upgrades permit the easy addition of new features or capabilities that may become available
in the future. Visit the Boonton website at WWW.BOONTON.COM for upgrade information and to download the
latest firmware version.