Implementation of Mixing Sequence Optimized Modulated Wideband Converter for Ultra-Wideband Frequency Hopping Signals Detection

Frequency hopping (FH) communications are widely used in Satcom systems. The latest FH systems have exceeded 3 GHz with hop rates up to 100 000 hops/s. Traditional spectrum sensing systems hardly monitor such signals. Modulated wideband converter (MWC) is an emerging compressive sampling structure applied to sample multiband signals. This article analyses the effects of the nonlinearity of analog devices and proposes an optimization method based on a greedy algorithm for mixing sequences to make reconstruction performance uniform across sub-bands. To correct the errors caused by the nonideality of analog front end circuits between the theoretical sensing matrix and the practical one, we also develop a calibrating method that obtains all the sensing matrix coefficients through a single measurement. In conventional MWC, out-band noise will be blended during reconstruction. Instead of matrix factorization, we reserve signal characters and designed sliding filters to improve narrowband signals reconstruction sensitivities. We produced a four-branch MWC principle prototype for FH signal detection. The sensing bandwidth is 3 GHz, and the sampling rate is 400 MHz, whereas the reconstruction sensitivity is as low as 13-dB in-band signal-to-noise.