It was a busy week in test and measurement, with a number of new products and upgrades, as well as technological advances.
—Anite has had a big week, both with its announcement of remote control for field units and its launch today of a major software update for its Propsim channel emulator platform that boosts its capacity for testing LTE-A multi-mode chipsets, devices and base stations. Anite says the new release allows users to create larger test scenarios in the lab for more realistic performance testing and assessment of end user experience, and that its multi-link emulation capability and test creation tools make it well-suited for carrier aggregation and HetNet performance testing.
—Anritsu’s work on LTE-A carrier aggregation is progressing, and its ME7873L RF/RRM conformance test system has the first Test Platform Approval Criteria (TPAC) from the Global Certification Forum for carrier aggregation.
Anritsu has been working on validations for CA since October 2013 and achieved TPAC for two band combinations (1-5 and 3-8) last month. It also has reached the 80% validation level for five more inter-band combinations through PTCRB.
—Agilent‘s electronic measurement continues to struggle as the company moves toward separating the business into its own company, which will be called KeySight Technologies.
Agilent said its orders for the first fiscal quarter ended Jan. 31 were down 2% year-over-year and revenues of $1.68 billion were flat. Overall, the company’s net income was up to $195 million from $179 million in the year-ago quarter, but electronic measurement revenues were down 7% year-over-year. The company also recorded pre-separation expenses of $20 million along with other items that dragged its adjusted net income of $226 million down to that $195 million figure.
Agilent’s president and CEO, Bill Sullivan, said that while the company’s life sciences, diagnostics and applied market businesses had a “solid start” to the year, electronic measurement “faced challenges in the aerospace/defense market.
“Our plans to separate into two companies are on track, and we expect the transaction to be completed in early November 2014,” he added.
—Spirent Communications launched Spirent SimSafe this week, which is a lab-based software solution that simulates legitimate and hoax Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals in order to evaluate how receivers respond to spoofing attacks and help develop counter-measures.
According to Spirent, there is no requirement on GNSS equipment to have any significant ability to detect or block malicious attacks, and receivers often don’t recognize a false signal and operate as normal, providing false time or position information.
“GNSS signal vulnerability is becoming a significant issue,” said John Pottle, Marketing Director of Spirent’s Positioning Division. “SimSAFE is the first tool to help develop systems that will detect and counter spoofing attacks. This solution is unique in being able to provide a means of both emulating a spoof attack and monitoring a receiver under attack to evaluate mitigation strategies and countermeasures.”
—JDSU launched a tablet-based solution for installation and troubleshooting indoor small cell site and distributed antenna system deployments. The new RANAdvisor TrueSite gathers real-time data from smartphones and a receiver in order to allow a single user to identify missing or faulty antennas and network performance issues, as well as assessing competitive information such as the performance differences among devices on the same network, or the same device across different networks.
—EXFO Inc. made two extensions to products that support testing of networks up to 100G. extended 40G/100G optical transport network (OTN) multiplexing test capabilities on its FTB/IQS‑85100G Packet Blazer 40G/100G multiservice test modules. Despite partial upgrades to 100G capacity, 10G services “remain the biggest contributor to service providers’ revenues,” EXFO noted, so network element manufacturers are trying to make sure they can cross-connect with 40G/100G offerings but still carry 10G or lower-rate traffic without compromising quality.
EXFO’s new offering includes an in-depth test suite for full simulation and analysis that helps operators optimize their 40G/100G bandwidth usage.
Meanwhile, the company also added a software update to its FTB/IQS88100NGE Power Blazer for turn-up and troubleshooting of Ethernet services. The upgrade includes Ethernet operations, administration and management capabilities; the ability to more quickly and accurately pinpoint network issues; and enabling autodiscovery of remote EXFO Ethernet testers so that it’s no longer necessary to have a technician on the far end to relay information.
