Optimizing DSP Techniques for Antenna Site Software Radio

With the emergence of monolithic A/D converters capable of sampling rates of 5 GHz and higher, engineers can now directly digitize analog RF signals covering a frequency span of more than 2 GHz. This allows the capture of wideband communications and radar signals in a single data stream, eliminating the complexity of splitting a given band into parallel adjacent sub-bands, and the inevitability of input signals straddling them. While these new converters appear to simplify software radio architectures, they also impose many limitations and tradeoffs.