Marta leaned back. She saved the trace file— Tower7_Interference_0223.anritsu —and attached it to her report.
At first, nothing. A flat line of healthy margin. Then, at 02:13 AM—precisely when Chicago’s backup jobs kicked off—she saw it. anritsu trace viewer
For three weeks, a high-value microwave link between two financial data centers had been dropping packets. Not enough to trigger a full alarm. Just enough for traders to complain about “slowness.” Vendors blamed the weather. Managers blamed the hardware. Marta blamed ghosts. Marta leaned back
She had run the standard tests. A quick sweep showed a clean signal. Carrier present. Modulation stable. “Textbook,” she muttered. But the packet loss log said otherwise. A flat line of healthy margin
Marta connected the USB cable. The software handshake clicked, and a timeline unfurled like a seismograph during an earthquake.
The Trace Viewer’s magic was its persistence. A normal spectrum sweep would have averaged this out, treated it as noise. But the Trace Viewer held every single sweep in memory, letting her scroll through time like a detective reviewing security footage.
Between 02:13 and 02:14, a second carrier had appeared 3 MHz away. Not a jammer. Not interference. It was their own equipment—a backup redundant transmitter, designed to be silent, had been leaking a carrier during its self-test cycle. The two signals were beating against each other, creating destructive interference for exactly 47 seconds.