Acousto-optic spectrum analyzer techniques for monitoring CW

The issues associated with processing the outputs of an integrating acoustooptical spectrum analyzer (AOSA) to detect and identify the frequency and power of continuous wave (CW) signals are considered. The performance of the optimum detection strategy is presented, along with the Cramer-Rao bound on the performance of estimators of the frequency, and the performance of a simple peak-based frequency estimator. The performance of the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator of the power level is also presented. The results provide the behavior of the system as a function of the product of the aperture time and photodetector spacing amongst other parameters