Nov 09: New Phantom Hand - CTIA hands and fixtures

For the last two years Indexsar have been heavily involved with the CTIA Head and hand working group in the development of Phantom Hands for OTA testing according to their revised standard: CTIA Test Plan for Mobile Station Over the Air Performance, Revision 3.0 (April 2009)

At the first CTIA audit at ETS-Lindgren on the 28th September, the IndexSAR IXB series of phantom hands, accessories, and fixtures were successfully tested in conjunction with the IndexSAR SAM phantom head. They were tested in both 'Talk' and 'Data' modes which were investigated in detail. It was confirmed that the combination of fixtures and phantoms were found to meet the requirements of the standard for integration into both 'conical cut' and 'roll-over' azimuth OTA systems. A further CTIA audit was made at SATIMO on the 28th October and the IndexSAR hands and fixtures were again found to meet the CTIA requirements.

Nov 06: New Phantom Hand - IXB-090

Following requests for a smaller phantom hand, we have produced a new hand, 10% smaller than our standard IXB-060 hand. The new IXB-090 is made from our standard material using carbon powder and chopped carbon fibre. The attenuation effect of this hand is very similar to our standard hand, but with less weight, which could be important in some test systems. The IXB-090 is being used 'in house' by Nokia and has been presented to the CTIA by them.

Hand spacer /positioning platform
Device positioning and repositioning is critical for repeatable measurements, in answer to requests from phone manufacturers who want to space the phone from the hand, to reproduce the air gap that it normally occurs when the phone is used in real situations, we have developed a unique and simple 'air' spacer.

First hand to have positional registration
The IXBS-060/90 'air' spacers that give a minimum air gap and, importantly, a platform to allow positive device positioning with graduations to show the lateral position and, a centreline, to give the ability to line the hand to the ear-mouth line of the SAM. We have also improved the DUT fixing method to use the 'Dual Lock' system from 3M, this gives a more rigid fixing, with less lateral movement than conventional 'Velcro'. Recent OTA measurements have shown excellent repeatability in the order of +/- 0.1dB when using the spacer.

Nov 05: Cost effective automatic SAR test system: SARA-C

The increased use of non handset wireless devices, and the utilisation of the 5-6GHz frequency band has created the need for an extension of the IEC SAR Standard. Part 2 of IEC 62209, IEEE 1528 (draft extension) and FCC OET65 Supplement C all require body worn, front-of-face, and large devices to be measured for SAR against a flat, ‘box‘ phantom.

The SARA-C consists of a compact Cartesian 4-axis robot constructed primarily from non-metallic materials with the ability to move a SAR or other probe in a 300mm volume with a minimum step size of 0.1mm. For probe isotropy checks, the probe can be rotated about its axis. The MultiSAR robot is mounted on a standard IndexSAR side bench. It uses all the low dielectric fixtures to mount test devices and validation antennas used in the SARA2 compliant test system. The robot is PC controlled via a USB serial link. Data is transferred via an optical cable and a second USB link.

The system is supplied (depending on option ordered) with software and validation hardware to make compliant SAR measurements according to IEC 62209 part 2, EN50383. Thanks to the speed of IndexSAR’s unique probe amplifier, and using a depth reconstruction post processing technique, pre-compliant SAR test results can be obtained in less than one minute, full compliant body tests take less than 6 minutes, making the system ideal for either, development or compliant testing. A sagittally bisected SAM phantom can be utilised for automatic pre-compliance handset testing. The ‘SARA-C’ can also be used to measure small base stations and picocells for localised SAR as required in EN50383.

The total system size is 500 x 500 x 1500mm.