Testing

Who should calibrate measurement instruments? When? And how? Users’ questions to do with calibration are remarkably easy to answer – provided you do not think about them too deeply. But as this article will show, there are layers of complexity underlying the issue of calibration, and they merit concentrated examination by any user who has a commercial requirement for traceable ...

Tektronix has introduced an oscilloscope with up to 2GHz bandwidth, 10Gsample/s sample rate, and 50Msample record length as standard. “A number of trends are driving change in the mid-range oscilloscope segment. Faster-speed serial buses such as USB 2.0, USB HSIC [inter-chip USB] and Ethernet are increasingly being used in embedded designs,” said the firm. “These in turn introduce design challenges ...

Avago has announced an optical fibre strain sensing method for industrial applications, based on plastic fibre and a patented optical phase interrogation (OPI) technique. “The sensing solution enables plastic optical fibre to be used as a high-precision strain sensor on par with current fibre Bragg grating strain sensors for applications including wind-blade load management and structural health monitoring,” said the ...

Tektronix has pushed up the acquisition bandwidth of its real-time spectrum analysers, at the same time as cutting noise in its ‘mixed domain’ oscilloscopes and improving its analysis software. All three up-dates have been made to better suit its products to testing next-generation Wi-Fi. “With the emergence of the Internet-of-things, more and more products are incorporating wireless LAN and they ...

Carrier aggregation, a wireless networking technique which uses multiple radio carriers to support higher mobile download speeds, is set to become an important element of future 4G mobile networks. “Carrier aggregation represents the immediate future of LTE-Advanced cellular deployments,” said Joe DePond, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Mobile Broadband Operation. The chosen modulation techniques mean that a basestation can send ...

Anritsu says its Protocol Conformance Test system for Rel-10 carrier aggregation, an important test function for LTE Advanced networks, has been validated by ced that industry testing standards body the GCF LTE Advanced, the enhanced higher speed 4G mobile standard, uses carrier aggregation to support higher data rates. The carrier aggregation function uses several frequency bands as a single band to speed up both peak ...

Agilent Technologies test and measurement business is separating from the larger life sciences and chemical analysis system business. This will create a ‘new’ test system supplier with an established portfolio of test and measurement products, but with a new brand name. But what will be different about this new test brand to convince the market that separation from the other ...

Oscilloscopes are one of the fundamental items of equipment that any test engineer will need to have frequent access too. In recent years the leading players in this sector have been engaged in a pitched battle to outdo each other through the development of high value, state-of-the-art-units (based on the latest semiconductor technology), which are capable of perpetually attaining higher ...

Anritsu will demonstrate a PAM4 signal simulation system on its stand at the ECOC 2013 exhibition in London  (22-26 September). PAM (Pulse Amplitude Modulation) is a high speed data communictaions protocol being developed to support data rates of 100Gbit/s over optical fibre and copper in the backplane and in server-to-server connections. Anritsu’s demonstration system implements PAM4 modulation in a signal simulation on the Anritsu MP1800A ...

UK-based Pico Technology has introduced a USB scope that samples in real time at 5Gsample/s. Called the PicoScope 6404D, is offers up to 500MHz bandwidth (1.25Gsample/s) on four channels simultaneously, and 2Gsample of buffer memory shared between the channels. Rise time (10-90%) is 700ps on all vertical ranges. It is part of the PicoScope 6000 series, all of which have ...