Testing

Trescal, the French calibration services company, acquired US-based General Calibration earlier this month. Trescal is expanding its presence in the American market. This is the calibration services company’s fourth acquisition in the US since the mid-2013 when it was acquired by Ardian, a private investment company. Guillaume Caroit, general secretary of Trescal Group, said: “This acquisition shows our strong commitment to ...

National Instruments UK  has presented its 2014 Engineering Impact Awards at The Royal Academy of Engineering, London. The 2014 Application of the Year Award was won by Sam Etchell, for his case study detailing London Underground’s use of NI CompactRIO for remote condition monitoring of track circuits on the Victoria Line, which carries 1.7 billion passengers per year and is ...

Electronic instruments designed for a single function are becoming as out-dated in industrial markets as they are in the consumer market. In that market products such as mobile phones and TVs are becoming multi-function devices defined by the software which runs on them. According to Rahman Jamal, marketing director at National Instruments, single function, or fixed personality devices, are becoming ...

NI is seeing its embedded design platform business, which includes CompactRIO, growing faster than the business as a whole. The company still derives majority of sales from its data acqusition and test product business which includes its PXIe modular instruments. The embedded design platform business was launched 10 years ago and it now accounts for around a third of company ...

Tektronix has released a USB 3.0-based spectrum analyser that plugs into a PC for its display and controls. Called RSA306, it has 9kHz-6.2GHz frequency range and 40MHz real time bandwidth. “As with nearly all areas of electronics design and test, requirements for RF and microwave test are changing quickly leading to the need for new instrumentation approaches,” said Tektronix general ...

Farnell element14 has partnered with Australian test gear house BitScope Designs to manufacture and distribute BitScope Micro, a dual-channel digital oscilloscope for Raspberry Pi. Also working with Windows and Linux PCs, and Macs; BitScope Micro is also an eight channel logic analyser, a signal generator, clock generator and spectrum analyser. Sampling rate is up to 40Msample/s, and analogue bandwidth is ...

Ask anyone from Keysight Technologies what the ‘new’ company is about and they are likely to say “measurement science”. Keysight Technologies comes into existence this month following the decision of Agilent Technologies to separate its life sciences and test businesses, creating the new company. There is a strong awareness for the company’s history in test and measurement technologies going back ...

At the 5G Global Summit, taking place in South Korea this week, Rohde & Schwarz will present details of a test setup for generating and analysing signals up to 67GHz, the millimetre wave band, as part of research for 5G mobile communications, reports Tom Wilson. The millimetre-wave test setup consists of the up to 20GHz SMW200A high-end vector signal generator, a harmonic mixer ...

Buying used instruments should definitely be on the radar of every user and purchaser of test equipment. It can offer very attractive savings on the new price, sometimes at discounts of 50-75% of the new price. Many suppliers offer remanufactured or refurbished instruments which are hard to differentiate from their new counterparts. At the other end of the scale, there ...

Cars are increasingly equipped with technologies designed to assist the driver in critical situations. Besides cameras and ultrasonic sensors, car makers are turning to radar as the cost of the associated technology decreases. The attraction of radar is that it provides fast and clear-cut measurement of the velocity and distance of multiple objects under any weather conditions. The relevant radar ...