An automated spurious immunity test setup for wideband radio receivers based on LabVIEW

An automated test environment was developed for spurious immunity testing of a wideband radio receiver front-end. The application, developed in Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) was used for testing a Software Defined Radio (SDR) operating from 2MHz to 2GHz. If done manually, spurious immunity testing is a time consuming process, moreover, there are chances of making manmade errors. The application runs in a Personal Computer (PC) which controls the SDR through the RS-232 interface and simultaneously configures the signal generator and spectrum analyzer through a General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) interface for taking the measurements. The SDR has an internal micro-controller, which is programmed to accept the frequency commands from the LabVIEW application through the RS-232 interface. The instrument parameters such as center frequency, peak search, marker reading etc are also controlled and read back through the GPIB interface. Basic Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA) blocks alone were used for controlling the instruments, instead of using third party instrument drivers. This will enable the application to communicate with instruments from different manufacturers.