Ian: Hi, this is Tony and Ian from Tektronix.
Tony: Hey, how are you doing?
Ian: We're back with another video. This one's about something that's all around us.
Tony: Then we're talking about wireless.
Ian: Wireless networking. It's everywhere these days, isn't it?
Tony: Man, it really is. I mean, I saw glasses the other day, to household appliances.
Ian: Whoops, excuse me. Hang on a second, I just got a message.
Tony: Didn't you turn that thing off.
Ian: Looks like my dishes are done.
Tony: Let's get those later Ian.
Ian: So anyway, no matter what part of the engineering process you're focused on, you're
probably going to come into contact with wireless networking.
Tony: Sure.
Ian: Like, let's say you're designing a circuit board that's going to go into some consumer
electronics.
Tony: Like something like this, something we've all seen.
Ian: It's probably going to have to connect to a wireless network. Or let's say you're
a technician and they've given you a whole pile of boards and said test these and find
out which ones are working and which ones aren't.
Tony: So this video is going to show how we've made that easier for you.
Ian: That's right. This could have been a long and complicated video with a lot of expensive
equipment in it.
Tony: But we know you don't like long videos.
Ian: So we're going to show you how to do this quickly and easily with the oscilloscope
that you've already got on your workbench.
Tony: I love this instrument.
Ian: The MDO4000B Mixed Domain Oscilloscope. Together with the SignalVu-PC software running
on a laptop.
Tony: Yup, and this video has two parts to it, right?
Ian: That's right. We're going to show you some shortcuts in the SignalVu-PC software
itself to get to those WLAN answers more quickly.
Tony: That's great.
Ian: And then we're going to also show you something new, the new COM option or live
link between the SignalVU-PC and the Mixed Domain Oscilloscope so that you're now capturing
and analyzing data live as you're acquiring it.
Tony: That sounds terrific. So no more thumb drives?
Ian: No more thumb drives. Should we get to the lab?
Tony: Let's go! Right away.
Tony: So here we are. We have SignalVu-PC on the laptop.
Ian: And it's got the COM option installed, which is what brings us this WLAN analysis
stuff and we've got a canned WLAN signal that we've acquired on a piece of real hardware
and then brought it over here to the software to analyze.
Tony: Okay, and we're going to pick a few different screens to analyze it with.
Ian: Yup, so let's start with the Spectrum Emission Mask display. This gives you an indication,
"Am I even transmitting something that looks like a WLAN signal?"
Tony: And that's the first thing you really want to do.
Ian: Yup. So as we can see, we have something that looks a lot like a WLAN signal. It even
fits under the mask, gives us a passing indicator. Next, you want to know is, "Is it pulsing
on and off the way it should?" So for that, we turn to the time overview. And we see that
yes indeed, the signal is pulsing on and off the way a WLAN signal should.
Tony: So we're two for two now.
Ian: Yup, two for two.
Tony: Now we go on to the third one.
Ian: Yup, the constellation diagram. So this gives us a clearer picture of, "Are we actually
transmitting a clean signal?"
Tony: This has always been an interesting one to me. Such a clear indication.
Ian: I love this. Yeah, you can see right away, "Is my signal hopping around in the
phase space the way it's supposed to."
Tony: This one here is perfect, right?
Ian: It's pretty good. Now, as our signal gets dirtier, our stars and our constellations
start to look a little more like nebulae. We get something like this.
Tony: Woah, we don't want that.
Ian: And then finally, let's say we want some more detail about our signal. So we can do
the WLAN summary display.
Tony: And this is for those really scientific people that just want everything laid out
for you.
Ian: It does give you a lot of data, but the nice thing is it also gives you the top level
pass/fail on a few different metrics and it gives you things like the error vector magnitude
and the IQ imbalance.
Tony: So we went through and selected these things one by one.
Ian: Right, and it was pretty easy.
Tony: Not too bad.
Ian: But there's a nice shortcut. So I'm going to close all these displays.
Tony: And that's what we like, right? Always ways to make it easier for us.
Ian: That's what we try to do. So instead, I'm going to go to the preset menu and choose
Standards > WLAN. I'm going to pick the standard that we're looking at today.
Tony: This is great.
Ian: This happens to be an 802.11ac signal. Click OK. It picks the frequency and the bandwidth
that are right for that standard. Now you're free to customize these afterwards. Like if
I wanted to, I could go in here and change the frequency to 2.4 GHz, but we start you
off with the best set of defaults.
Tony: And these are all the ones that we had just looked at.
Ian: Exactly. It put the best displays out for that standard that we chose in the arrangement
that's most helpful to us.
Tony: That's excellent.
Ian: So we've been doing all of this on a CAN signal.
Tony: Right.
Ian: There's one more piece of the COM option, which is...
Tony: And this is the cool part, yeah.
Ian: The remote option.
Tony: Yeah, and this is excellent.
Ian: We can connect to an MDO4000B Mixed Domain Oscilloscope and do the same kind of analysis
on live data that we're pulling in from the instrument.
Ian: We've got an MDO4000B Mixed Domain Oscilloscope. It's got a wireless LAN signal going into
the RF port. We've tuned it to the right frequency. We can see that, yes indeed, there is a signal
there. So now we're ready to take device end of our USB port and plug it into the back
of the Mixed Domain Oscilloscope. Okay, so we plug in the other end of the USB cable
into the laptop.
Tony: Make sense, yeah.
Ian: Then we go to the Live Link menu and we choose "Search For Instruments". So it
goes out, it scans the network, it scans USBs, it scans GPIB if you got a card. And then
it populates this menu with all the instruments that it found. So we're going to pick our
USB instrument.
Tony: There it is, showing up easily.
Ian: We get a confirmation. And now our display is updating live with the data that it's grabbing
from the MDO4000B Mixed Domain Oscilloscope.
Tony: Just as easy as that?
Ian: Yup.
Tony: That's great.
Ian: And if we want more information about the connection, we can hover over this little
link here. Now, of course, this MDO4000B Mixed Domain Oscilloscope is just right across the
workbench.
Tony: I made it pretty easy, but what if I'm remote?
Ian: Like how remote?
Tony: What if I'm in my corner office? What if I'm in the gym working out? What if I'm
on a bike ride?
Ian: Hey, there you are. How was your field trip?
Tony: Good, really good.
Ian: Would you look at that? Okay, so how do we do all that? That was really easy, we
just plugged an Ethernet cable into the back of the Mixed Domain Oscilloscope.
Tony: This is like two or three steps, right?
Ian: Yeah, I mean, you just go to the Live Link menu exactly like before. You choose
"Scan For Instruments" or you can enter an IP address in manually. It verifies that it
can find the instrument. It gives us a little confirmation dialog once it has. And now we
are updating live, just like we were last time, only this time it's with LAN and the
device can be anywhere. As long as you've got power and Ethernet connection.
Tony: Wow, no more CAN signals?
Ian: No more CAN signals.
Tony: That's great.
Tony: Ian, that was really easy.
Ian: Yeah, we just took our MDO4000B Mixed Domain Oscilloscope and connected it to a
laptop.
Tony: And we did the wireless.
Ian: And the wireless tablet, yeah, all running SignalVU PC and we got right to the answers
Tony: And those presets were really great too.
Ian: Yeah.
Tony: So we can find more information.
Ian: That's right. There's a link in the description below to our www.tektronix.com website and
until our next video, we'll see you.
Tony: See you later.