Hi, my name is Scott Leithem, and I'm an engineer at Keysight Technologies. Today I'm going
to show you how the MXA can help you take new-generation wireless devices to market.
As the demand for capacity and coverage grows, newer techniques need to be employed.
Heterogeneous networks, also known as HetNets, combine large macro cells with small cells and strategic handoffs.
LTE Advanced has introduced many new features to address more efficient operation and the
need to utilize small cells. Chief amongst these new features are carrier aggregation
and the use of 256-QAM modulation. Due to the short range in operating environment of
the small cell, it is possible to achieve enough signal-to-noise ratio for higher-order
modulation, which in turn increases data rates.
Now, as wider bandwidth and more complex modulation schemes are employed, the hardware designs
are pushed to their limits. Test requirements are also increasing. So design engineers are
always looking for tools to streamline their development and verification and allow them
to avoid spending extra time learning the equipment interface.
Let's demodulate one of these signals using the new Keysight MXA and the LTE-Advanced app.
Today I'm gonna show you how to make a modulation analysis measurement on this
256-QAM signal.
I have downloaded an LTE Advanced signal into our Keysight MXG. Then I have taken a direct
line into our MXA. Here I have a swept spectrum measurement, and you can see my signal is
sitting somewhere around 2 GHz and I'm gonna use a feature on our analyzers called
Autotune to very quickly set our analyzer span, reference level, and center frequency.
What it's doing is a band-power search to find the signal.
Next, I'm gonna go into our LTE Advanced measurement application, and I'm going to select our modulation
analysis measurement. And you can see that it's set up to demodulate the signal, but
there's clearly some issue. The analyzer doesn't know that this is a 256-QAM modulation, so
we need to turn on higher-order modulation.
We can do that using this new, fast, and easy user interface, and that's with two touches,
we can open up our Advanced Demod setup dialogue, and we turn on higher-order modulation. And
now you can see our constellation is very clean and we're able to demodulate the signal.
You can also see our Error Vector Time display is not scanned properly. So I'm going to fix
that by setting Autoscale here. So now you can see a result display.
The key advantage of our results is that everything is color-coded. In our frame summary, we can
see each part of the signal and we've assigned a color to it. It has an EVM result, power,
and the modulation format. And each one of those corresponds to the same colors in the
Error Vector Time display and the Constellation display. So if you're seeing any problems
in your measurement, it's very fast and easy to find.
Another advantage of the new interface is that we can quickly open up new windows. And
you can see that it copies the same measurement. It also copies the same exact settings. And
when I do that, I can then very quickly switch over to other measurements within the LTE
application. In this example, let's show an ACP measurement. I don't have to do anything
else to set up the measurement. I get my ACP results very quickly. And now if I wanna switch
back to our modulation results to see how my signal is affected by it, I can do that,
and I can switch very quickly once again back to the ACP.
You've just seen how easy it is to demodulate the latest signals using the new Keysight
MXA. You can quickly troubleshoot and verify designs. The easy setup, color-coded displays,
and flexible windows minimize your time and take the effort out of deciphering complex
results.
Check out our Web for the latest information on the MXA, your optimal choice for testing
wireless devices and systems. The MXA has the flexibility to adapt to evolving test
requirements both today and tomorrow. Thanks for watching.