Test & Measurement Channel - Leading Manufacturer News, Articles & Content

RSS

Today's wireless world requires unrelenting technological innovation. From cell phones that take and send photos to homeland security, the demands on wireless designers for increasing complexity at lower prices and faster time-to-market are immense. Advances in electronic design automation (EDA) over the last decade have made possible dramatic improvements...

In order to test high power amplifiers used in today's cellular base station equipment it is sometimes necessary to perform automated switching of the high power amplifiers without shutting down the system to make the RF connection. The high power RF signal must be diverted from the main signal...

Additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) has proven itself over the years as a simple yet extremely valuable tool in measurements ranging from BER and SINAD testing to wireless link emulation and the overall characterization of communications receiver performance. The unique characteristics of AWGN are becoming even more useful now...

Setting new standards in flexibility and performance and opening the possibility for new applications, the R&S SMU200A is said to be the first high end generator to combine two complete digital signal generators with modulation capabilities in one instrument. It provides space for up to two RF paths in...

Determining cross-modulation interference is an important factor in the design of a code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile transceiver. The cross-modulation interference level directly affects the performance of the receiver's ability to overcome the spurious interferences, such as what the IS-98 1 calls single tone desensitization. A few papers...

This article continues the trend of previous publications, 1,2 to simplify the prediction of RF performance of systems designed for wireless digital communications. The first shows the correlation between sidelobes and intermodulation (IM) products. Sidelobes are the result of the spectrum re-growth when a digitally modulated signal is applied...

The term "one size fits all" has never applied to microwave test fixtures. They are instead almost always custom creations designed to serve a specific test application, and cannot easily be modified to meet other needs in the future. This has always presented a problem for cost-conscious designers. In...

The gigahertz transverse electromagnetic mode (GTEM) cell was first proposed in 1987 1 and subsequently patented in 1989 by D. Konigstein and D. Hansen 2 as a high frequency variant of the transverse electromagnetic mode (TEM) cell, which is also known as the Crawford cell. 3 The GTEM cell...

Generally, an oscillator can be seen as a positive feedback system. It usually consists of an amplifier followed by a resonator, which is fed back to the amplifier input, as shown in Figure 1 . The amplifier task is to compensate for the losses in the resonator, and the...

Accurately measuring the power in wideband signals used in 3G and pulsed systems requires a power meter with a high bandwidth. To address this market condition, the ML2487A (single-channel) and ML2488A (dual-channel) high speed peak power meters have been developed that feature 20 MHz channel bandwidth, which is a...