Pentek, Inc., announced a major addition to its family of Talon® signal recording and playback systems, the RTX 2684 26 GHz RF Sentinel™ Intelligent Signal Scanning small form factor recorder. The RTX 2684 combines the power of a Pentek Talon Recording System with a 26 GHz RF tuner and Pentek's Sentinel intelligent signal scanning software, packaged in a rugged, small form factor (SFF) 1/2 ATR chassis. Pentek's SFF recorders provide the performance of large rackmount recorders in the smallest footprint available in Pentek’s Talon product line.

The Talon RTX 2684 SFF recorder weighs just 23 pounds and is designed for extreme operating environments. Optimized for SWaP (size, weight and power), the rugged sealed ½ ATR recorder is available with up to 61 TB of removable SSD storage. The ½ ATR chassis makes it highly suitable for military, security and government intelligence (SIGINT, COMINT and ELINT) applications that are mobile or very space limited.

“The RTX 2684 Sentinel recorder is a complete antenna to disk solution with RF signals downconverted directly to the A/D converters,” said Rodger Hosking, vice president of Pentek. “Its 5x reduction in packaging size over the rackmount equivalent, bandwidth performance, and storage capacity all offer huge improvements in addressing challenging SWaP constraints in mobile or space limited platforms.”

A Pentek Model 78141A Jade® transceiver module serves as the data acquisition engine of the Talon RTX 2684. One of its dual 3.2 GS/sec 12-bit A/D converters operates at a sample rate of 2.8 GS/sec. The Model 78141 is coupled to the 500 MHz bandwidth analog IF output signal of a 26 GHz RF tuner front end, delivering excellent dynamic range across its entire spectrum. A digital down-converter (DDC) in the Model 78141 provides frequency zooming for recording signal bandwidths of 500, 250 or 125 MHz.