Extreme Wideband Spectral Analysis and Direction Finding based on an Spatial Spectral Holographic Signal Processor

Navy electronic support (ES) functions require receivers making true wideband RF / microwave measurements on transient & frequency hopping signals over 1-40 GHz and beyond, including spectral mapping (SM) and direction finding (DF) with low latency. Wideband digitizers in RF/Microwave receivers are expensive, create ~50 Gs/s of data to be handled in real time by large computer systems, and have insufficient performance over wideband stares for Naval operations. The S2 Corp extreme bandwidth analyzer and correlator (EBAC) hardware is an RF / microwave receiver capable of SM and DF to be improved and tested on this effort. The EBAC is comprised of RF / microwave, photonic, cryogenic and electronic / digital components. RF signals are optically modulated at the antenna and fiber optically connected to other receiver components. On this program, we aim to improve the performance of our hardware, and field test it to demonstrate the capabilities. The technical goals for both SM and DF hardware in laboratory and field tests is over 16 GHz bandwidth, 60 dB spur free dynamic range, ~2 ms reconfiguration latency, variable frame rate from 2-200 kHz, variable resolution bandwidth from 0.04-10 MHz, and direction finding accuracy of