Testing

Since 1990, the accreditation of EMC laboratories has become increasingly important in many parts of the world. This development has been mainly driven by the sharp increase in the number of electric and electronic products that have been introduced to the global marketplace.

Thermal testing, also known as heat testing, is one of the most critical tests required by the majority of regulatory safety standards in determining the safety of a product.
Excessive heat is the number one enemy in any electrical or electronic circuit. Designers are perpetually trying to improve the way to reduce heat or partially cool their products because they are being asked to design products with higher power density into smaller sizes, while operating temperatures of components or devices have not changed greatly over the past few decades. This means that component temperatures must be well controlled to avoid any failure and to increase the reliability of the product.

From the time when automotive vehicles were essentially mechanical with spark ignition the only electrical system, through the many decades that brought the development of electrical, electronic and computer controlled automotive systems, the need for and methods of automotive testing have evolved along with the vehicles. At one time, electrical testing was sufficient. But with the dawn of the digital computer era, compatibility became a major issue. Those pesky clocked systems are inherently noise producers and are also subject to immunity issues.

This article provides a basis for using gated time domain and a highly reflective mirror to measure the gain, phase, beamwidth and radiation pattern of broadband antennas. The tests were completed using the Anritsu VectorStar VNA. The speed and data points (100,000) make possible high resolution in time domain. Three commercial reference horns were measured and an aperture and mirror conductivity correction applied. The resulting data agreed reasonably well with the published data. Two additional classical methods were also performed for validation.