It is attempted to estimate excitation force of a linear vibratory system using measured vibration responses. The excitation force is estimated from the relationship between the vibration response and system characteristic matrices which are extracted from both the mathematical model of the system and actual response in contrast to the usual approach of inverting the frequency response matrices. This extraction scheme is based on the fact that the vibration response can be expressed in term of linear combination of frequency domain modal vectors defined as mutually orthonormal basis vectors in frequency domain. The extracted frequency domain basis vectors are very stable in computational manipulation. It is found that the estimated excitation force is in good agreement with actually measured force except at the natural frequencies the structure, which is the common feature still to be overcome by the research efforts in this area. From the results of this paper, this disagreement is considered to come from the discrepancy between the model and actual value of the mass, damping and stiffness of the structure.