White Papers

Featured for the first time at Autovation 2012 will be the RF Savvy Series, patent pending, Nona-band Radio Frequency (RF) Coupler from Alpha Micro Wireless. The high 10 kV electrical isolation enables safe routing of the RF signal from the network interface card (NIC) or wireless modem to a remote external antenna via a bulk head RF connection in the meter base.

The "Testing New-generation Wireless LAN" application note discusses the differences between 802.11ac (designed for Very High Throughput - VHT) and previous WLAN standards, the test requirements and the new challenges VHT brings. The application note also introduces the WLAN new-generation testing technology of 802.11ac and explains in detail Agilent's 802.11ac software which allows engineers to view and troubleshoot all 802.11ac modulation formats.

This application note is designed to provide you with the latest insights on how to best address the long list of test requirements when testing the voice quality of LTE UE, with the right VoIP test building blocks. Successfully providing voice support on LTE will require UE developers to bring together a host of new features and capabilities. Many of these items have been around for a while but have not yet been applied to mobile networking. Others are completely new. Regardless, bringing them together will likely cause significant test pain, as they will need to be tested in conjunction with LTE and/or IMS to be fully exercised.

The complexity of modern digital equipment has caused EMI/EMC susceptibility testing to become increasingly important. Many EMC standards have been created including MILSTD- 461, IEC 61000, ISO 11451 Automotive, EN 50, and FCC part 15 that provide specific guidelines for EMC and EMI test methodologies. Early standards required a CW carrier, or single tone with constant modulation as the disturbance test signal. This article will discuss how a peak power sensor can replace an average diode detector in a field probe to measure pulse power, improve repeatability and increase dynamic range of the power measurement.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of modern automated load-pull, including a discussion of early impedance synthesis methods, and how they were improved with breakthrough innovations such as Focus MPTTM technology and systematic high-VBW sub-1 Ω test-fixture design techniques. More recent developments are next treated, including active-loop and active-injection impedance synthesis architectures, time-domain data acquisition, and advanced data processing and visualization.

Most discussions of IMS refer to the all-IP network and the massive levels of convergence it will deliver: convergences of access technologies, services and control functions. In describing the IMS subsystem itself, most of the attention is given to the large-scale upgrades required near the heart of the network. However, developers working on cellular devices require a different viewpoint than those working at higher layers of the protocol stack. In that light, this article presents a brief overview of the IMS subsystem from the perspective of the mobile device.

A system that utilizes OFDM/OFDMA, such as the E-UTRA (LTE) downlink or the IEEE 802.11a/g and the IEEE 802.16 physical layers, transmits OFDM symbols, each comprising a number of modulated sub-carriers carrying data or pilot symbols, with inter-subcarrier spacing being equal to or an integer multiple of a fixed frequency. The channel bandwidth (B) is determined by the number of 'occupied' (modulated) subcarriers and the subcarrier spacing.

There is a wide variety of coaxial connectors and cables available for use in the RF and Microwave spectrum. While often not much thought is given to these essential components, a misstep here can result in undesirable system degradation. Given that typical RF systems are comprised of any number of items, e.g. RF generators, amplifiers, attenuators, power meters, couplers, antennas, etc., it is not uncommon that a great deal of thought is given to these “high end devices while mundane items such as connectors and cables are often treated as an afterthought".

Whenever time to market is critical, rapid prototyping can produce a first draft of a new product that allows testing, evaluation, and further refinement of the product idea, which helps a company more quickly and cost-effectively transform early concepts into marketable products. At the same time, for concepts that may not make practical products, rapid prototyping can spare a company further investment time and expenses by revealing the product's flaws at an early stage of the development process.

This White Paper begins by explaining how fading occurs and describing traditional methods of radio channel emulation. It continues to describe the innovative, all-digital, approach used in the Aeroflex 7100 Series Radio Test Platform. It will be demonstrated that the Aeroflex platform allows realistic testing of LTE user equipment to be performed in a way that is impractical with traditional methods.