Time Domain Measurements in automotive applications

Time Domain Measurements are required to analyze and interpret transient disturbing RF signals. In the area of future automotive applications, transient RF disturbances are becoming critical because comfort options like Bluetooth connection, external devices with complex integrated RF functionality (automotive WLAN, UMTS, GSM, WCDMA, MIMO devices, multiband smart phones, Net-books) have to interface with integrated car entertainment and control systems. Due to the technical concept of such wireless communication networks with digital modulation schemes, the interferences are often short events with transient characteristics. The detection and reproducible measurement of such signals is difficult because of missing trigger signals and can be performed today with Time Domain Measurement Systems using fast A/D converters, digital filters and the Fourier Analysis to transform the measured data into the frequency domain.