Wi-Fi 6/6E 160 MHz Channels—Complete and Uncompromised: This is the defining application. Wi-Fi 6 introduced 160 MHz channels as a standard operating mode, and Wi-Fi 6E opens new 6 GHz spectrum where 160 MHz channels are the expected norm. At 85 MHz, you physically cannot capture a 160 MHz Wi-Fi channel—you see barely half of it, which means you can't measure EVM across the full channel, you can't verify the spectral mask at both channel edges simultaneously, and you can't detect cross-subchannel interference in 80+80 MHz non-contiguous mode. The B160 changes this completely: one real-time acquisition captures the entire 160 MHz channel, every OFDMA resource unit, every MU-MIMO stream, every management frame and data burst—with 100% POI to catch the transients that swept analysis misses.
5G NR 100 MHz Carriers with ACLR Measurement Margin: A 100 MHz 5G NR carrier (the widest single carrier in FR1) occupies approximately 98 MHz of bandwidth. At 85 MHz, you can't even fit the carrier. At 160 MHz, you capture the entire 100 MHz carrier plus 30 MHz of margin on each side—enough for meaningful ACLR measurement in real-time without switching to swept mode. This matters during PA development where you need to see spectral regrowth appear in real-time as you adjust DPD coefficients, bias points, or drive levels. The feedback loop between "tweak a parameter" and "see the ACLR change" is immediate with 160 MHz real-time bandwidth, versus interrupted and slow with swept measurements.
Dual 80 MHz Channel Co-Existence Testing: Modern wireless environments are dense. Two adjacent 80 MHz Wi-Fi channels, or a Wi-Fi channel and a 5G NR carrier sharing adjacent spectrum—these are real deployment scenarios where inter-system interference determines user experience. At 160 MHz, you see both signals simultaneously in real-time: how one affects the other, when they collide, and how their dynamic behavior interacts over time. At 85 MHz, you can only observe one at a time and piece together the interference picture from separate measurements—missing the time-correlated events that actually cause problems in the field.
Wideband Radar Pulse Compression Analysis: High-resolution FMCW and pulse-compression radar systems increasingly use chirp bandwidths of 100–150 MHz for improved range resolution. The B160 captures these complete chirps in a single real-time acquisition, enabling analysis of chirp linearity across the full bandwidth, identification of modulation-on-chirp impairments, and verification of pulse compression performance. At 85 MHz, wideband chirps are truncated, making it impossible to assess linearity or spectral purity across the full chirp bandwidth.
Wi-Fi 7 Readiness: Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) supports 320 MHz channels, but also introduces enhanced 160 MHz modes with 4K-QAM. If you're developing Wi-Fi 7 products, 160 MHz real-time bandwidth is the minimum for characterizing the 160 MHz operating modes. (For 320 MHz mode testing, the 255 MHz option provides partial coverage.)