HPx-250 PMC Radar Input Card

The dual analogue inputs are captured at up to 50 MHz using high precision analogue to digital converters at 12 bits resolution. The captured video can be optionally down-sampled to reduce the data rate before transfer across the PCI bus using high-speed DMA.

The HPx-250 interfaces to analogue or digital radar signals, and provides a flexible set of input options to handle a wide range of radar types. A flexible mixing capability allows a combination of analogue and digital inputs to be captured and combined.

The HPx-250 accepts radar video, trigger and azimuth signals in the form of ACP/ARP or parallel data. A wide variety of signal types and input voltages are supported and customised versions of the interface are available on request. The card provides a capability to detect missing signals to provide software alarms for loss of triggers or azimuth data.

A board support library is available to provide a C++ class interface to configure the board and capture video, providing direct access to the video samples. Example code is available for Windows and Linux.

Alternatively, Cambridge Pixel’s extensive SPx software is available to provide advanced processing and display of the radar video data. SPx software can be supplied in the form of a library for use in custom application code or as ready-made applications, such as SPx Server, which have built-in support for the HPx-250 card.

The SPx Development Library provides an extensible toolkit of radar specific functions that can be linked together to form a processing chain. Custom functions are easily incorporated into the processing chain, allowing an application to be built from a combination of SPx Development Library functions and user-written processing modules. Cambridge Pixel’s ready-to-run applications offer solutions for both server-side processing and network distribution and for client-side receipt and display.