Introduction to RVP10
RVP10 is the next generation of dedicated weather radar signal processors developed by Vaisala and the legacy Sigmet over 40 years of history.
The RVP10 generation brings many needed hardware features to make use of the emergence of the solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) evolution that is about to take over transmitter technology. These features include:
- Dedicated support of multiple transmitters within a single radar system
- Generation and streaming of multiple channels of IQ data over network
- Multiple waveform definitions used in parallel or in sequence transmitted over more than one carrier frequency having pulse compression, phase and polarity modulation
- Dynamic and adaptive receive filter coefficients for the generation of IQ
- Increased stability of time synchronization resulting in more accurate data tagging of antenna location during transmission and improvements in phase coherency
- More linear ZDR measurement over the entire dynamic range when compared to RVP900
| Year | Model | Units sold | Major technical milestones |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1981 | FFT | 10 | First commercial FFT-based Doppler signal processor for weather radar applications, featured simultaneous Doppler and Intensity processing. |
| 1985 | RVP5 | 161 | First single-board low-cost Doppler signal processor. First commercial application of dual-PRF velocity unfolding algorithm. |
| 1986 | PP02 | 12 | First high-performance commercial pulse-pair processor with 18.75 m bin spacing and 1024 bins. |
| 1992 | RVP6 | 150 | First commercial floating-point DSP-chip based processor. First commercial processor to implement selectable pulse pair, FFT or random phase 2nd trip echo filtering. |
| 1996 | RVP7 | >200 | First commercial processor to implement fully digital IF processing for weather radar. First use of multiple channels for high dynamic range applications. |
| 2003 | RVP8 | >500 | First digital receiver/signal processor implemented using an open hardware/software architecture with public APIs on a standard PC under the Linux operating system. First use of NLFM pulse compression. |
| 2007 | RVP900 | >1200 | Longest deployed weather radar signal processor on the market with zero hardware revisions needed since its first release 15 years ago. |
| 2022 | RVP10 | The first public and secured APIs to Transmitter waveform and IQ generator. The first commercial use of multiprocessor system on a chip (MPSoC) running embedded Linux application and FPGA. |