Base and mobile station test

Agilent Technologies has introduced a series of new capabilities for its PSA Series spectrum analysers that allow the instruments to characterise components and systems for base and mobile stations based on the TD-SCDMA (time division synchronous CDMA) and 1xEV-DV (1x evaluation, data and voice) wireless access methods. These capabilities, together with existing standards-based measurement personalities, form a comprehensive wireless signal analysis package in a single instrument.

The TD-SCDMA measurement personality (Option 211) for the PSA Series spectrum analysers allows designers to fully characterise the transmitted signals of TD-SCDMA base stations with a single instrument. It is equally suited to both design and development environments and has an intuitive user interface that makes the process fast and simple. The standards-based power measurements for both uplink and downlink signals include power versus time, transmit power, adjacent channel power and multi-channel power (up to 12 channels), as well as spurious emissions and spurious emissions masks.

The user has numerous choices within each measurement. For example, when measuring transmit power the user can display the minimum, maximum and mean values of a single burst or complete 10 ms frame, and can select either RMS or log averaging. When using spectrum emission masks (which measure spurious emissions within specific frequency bands), the designer can simultaneously display both spectrum and tabular results. Average or peak detection can be selected and the offset frequency, reference bandwidth and limit values can be specified.

In addition, the Agilent 89601A vector signal analysis software, which includes troubleshooting tools for analysing many types of signals, can also demodulate TD-SCDMA signals. This allows the PSA Series, in combination with the analysis software, to troubleshoot a broad array of modulation problems in addition to the TD-SCDMA power measurements provided by Option 211.

To allow 1xEV-DV components and systems to be characterised, Agilent has created new composite rho and code-domain tests that support code-domain 8 PSK and 16 QAM modulation techniques. The new measurement personality is available as Option 214 for the PSA Series analysers.