Educational Set-Up for Microwave Laboratory Activities Using Virtual Instruments and Real Data

This paper describes a virtual educational laboratory to be used for experimental activities in the framework of Telecommunications Engineering courses. The proposed approach is based on a set of software interfaces, named virtual instruments (VIs) and developed with LabVIEW(TM) environment, which are able to emulate hardware instruments. The aim of the project is to allow the students to perform experimental activities, either in the college labs or at home, without the physical availability of measurement instruments by simply using software emulators of real instruments that process real data acquired from real world. The system is being used in the Laboratory of Telecommunications and Microwave of the Engineering college of the University of Pisa, Italy.