New Equipment Allows for Full Characterization of Antennas, Filters, and Subcomponents for Best Performance, Lowest Cost
RAYMOND, Maine -- April 8, 2008 -- Dielectric Communications, a division of SPX and a world leader in broadcast antenna systems, has assembled a collection of new equipment to create a high-performance testing facility and expand the company‘s RF measurement capabilities. The testing facility is located at Dielectric‘s headquarters in Raymond, Maine.
“Dielectric is committed to providing the highest-quality products at the most affordable cost, and our new testing facility really helps us in accomplishing this goal,” said Dielectric President Garrett VanAtta. “Our new state-of-the-art testing equipment allows us to more fully isolate the variables that affect the performance of our antennas, filters, and other components, thus enabling a better understanding of how they are performing and how they will operate at our customers‘ sites.”
The heart of Dielectric‘s new testing facility is a high-performance, 60-foot tapered electromagnetic anechoic chamber that is optimized to measure radiation patterns from 400 MHz to 5 GHz. Since both the source antenna and the antenna under testing operate with rotational flexibility, horizontal, vertical, elliptical, and circularly polarized antennas can all be completely and efficiently evaluated within the chamber. Each measurement is carried out in a controlled, reflection-free environment so that external factors such as weather, scatter, and noise do not affect the test results.
The new testing facility also features a 250-watt power amplifier and a 950-cubic-foot, high-power PIM (passive intermodulation) chamber, which provides a completely enclosed, reflection-free environment in which full-sized antennas can be tested under high-power conditions to verify that they are free of any intermodulation. This test ensures premium quality of service for bidirectional systems. A new 64-cubic-foot thermal chamber enables Dielectric to fully characterize compact rack-mountable filters and integrated subsystems over the full range of operational temperature requirements (from -35 degrees Celsius to 150 degrees Celsius at 0-95% RH) to better meet demanding environmental extremes.
Included in the new testing facility are a spectrum analyzer, high-frequency network analyzers, and a dual power meter for power monitoring. The facility also can test integrated active component noise figures with its new noise figure meter that ensures low-noise operation.
Information on Dielectric‘s full range of broadcast antenna systems is available at www.dielectric.com.
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About Dielectric Communications (a unit of SPX Corporation)
Based in Raymond, Maine, Dielectric Communications (www.dielectric.com) is the nation‘s largest manufacturer of broadcast antenna systems for radio, mobile media, and television.
Dielectric Communications is a unit of SPX Corporation, a Fortune 500 multi-industry manufacturing leader. The company offers highly specialized engineered solutions to solve critical problems for customers. More information is available at www.spx.com.
