National Instruments and its Australian alliance partner Emona Instruments have jointly developed a new add-on telecommunications board, the Digital Analog Telecommunications EXperimenter (DATEx), for the NI Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite (NI ELVIS). With DATEx and the NI ELVIS integrated design and prototyping platform, students now can visualize telecommunications concepts in a hands-on learning environment. DATEx also operates with the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment to give students more control for building telecommunications projects using the graphical system design and block diagram approach.

Article Tools

• 

“By combining DATEx with the NI ELVIS platform, educators can immediately demonstrate real-world concepts using actual telecommunications signals to teach the skills that will prepare students to design innovative telecommunications systems,” said Ray Almgren, vice president of academic marketing at NI. “The integration with LabVIEW graphical system design gives future engineers and scientists an environment on which to develop telecommunications building blocks, making it possible for projects designed on DATEx to transfer from academia to industry.”

There are more than 30 different analog and digital communication experiments that students can implement on DATEx with the NI ELVIS platform, giving educators the ability to customize lesson plans and teach specific telecommunications concepts such as AM, FM, time-division multiplexing (TDM), phase-locked loops (PLLs), amplitude-shift keying (ASK), spread spectrum (SS) and line coding (LC). Educators can teach these concepts with low startup costs because of the plug-in and integrated style of DATEx.

“DATEx provides students with an enhanced experience for designing, prototyping and deploying telecommunications projects,” said Alfred Breznik, international sales and marketing manager at Emona Instruments. “We are excited to work with National Instruments to provide the academic community with a product that teaches all the fundamental concepts for modeling telecommunications theory in an intuitive, graphical programming and open-standard platform.”