Intellectual property patent status

With a new innovation, ‘ElectroMagnetic Environment’ (EME) spectrum data can be captured in the field and statistically recreated in the laboratory using standard lab test equipment. This enables quality insights to better characterise the performance of the devices and systems being tested, which may be impacted by the EME that they operate within.

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Background

Testing and exercising radio communication equipment (such as two-way radios, mobile phones, and much more) to measure performance and limitations at different frequencies, requires test equipment such as spectrum analysers. Traditionally, this communication equipment has needed to be tested in different electromagnetic environments in order to measure its performance.

The key issues that users have faced with this process are that capturing EME spectrum data requires huge amounts of storage, and there are also legal constraints on both how this data can be stored and how it can be shared, regarding data privacy issues (such as GDPR).

The solution

With a new technology: Waveform Regeneration via FFT Bin History Statistics, it is now possible to recreate an EME with an identical statistical profile to one captured in the field. This means that, instead of the user recording a signal and playing it back to their system – which requires large amounts of storage, processing, and privacy law alignments – they are able to artificially produce, within the lab, a statistically identical signal to what was captured in the field to measure the equipment’s performance levels and limitations accurately.

This innovation has been created to make it easier and simpler to test the equipment and exercise it to the extremities of its capabilities – vastly reducing storage requirements, removing any privacy issues, and streamlining the whole process.

Key benefits

  • This technology enables the user superior control on how ‘demanding’ the spectrum capture is. Previously, the spectrum capture has been limited by what it happens to see at the particular time of capture, with little to no control of this aspect.
  • The storage requirements are significantly smaller with this innovation. Traditionally, the storage requirements for recording signal background in a contested electromagnetic environment have been significant. The recording and playback of any statistically varying signal is inherently limited by available storage capacity on the recording device (e.g. >15GB for 1 minute of a 40MHz wide band IQ data).
  • There are legal restrictions in the UK as to what data can be captured, analysed, stored and replayed. With this innovation, fewer regulatory restrictions need to be navigated.
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Potential applications

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‘Radio Frequency’ (RF) test equipment

This is the primary application for this intellectual property – enabling the capabilities and limitations of radio communication equipment to be tested at different frequencies and in different environments in a more streamlined and simple process.

Other potential applications

Other possible applications for this innovation include: spectrum management, interference hunting, SIGINT (signal intelligence – for testing only) data collection, EMC (electromagnetic combability) testing, and RF system design.

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