SKA.SaDT EMC emission measurements at ASTRON

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Clik here to view.© ASTRON, University of Manchester, CISCO, NOKIA

Last week, colleagues from Manchester university, NOKIA and CISCO have performed emission measurements in the EMC facility at ASTRON. The goal was to assess the emission levels of the latest 100 GB switch and transmission equipment from different manufacturers up to a RF frequency of 20 GHz. This class of equipment is investigated for possible use for science data transport in the SKA telescope arrays.

Since the spurious emission is to be measured up to 20 GHz, a straightforward test setup would not be adequate. Therefore a special setup was made to load the equipment with 100G Ethernet traffic, and to configure it to represent operation in a SKA dish pedestal environment.

The RF measurement setup was pushed to its limits. Two standard gain antenna's and extra low noise gain amplifiers were used to cover the frequency range, and to improve the signal to noise ratio. By using these 'known' antennas and the calibration data, the effective field strength radiated from the Unit under Test could be calculated back during post-processing.

We built the RF setup together, calibrated it and processed the measured data. At the end of the week all the planned EMC tests were finalized successfully.

(The insert shows hardware to be tested)