Acentury

One of the biggest issues seen in RF labs is the need to share expensive and limited test resources among a larger group of testers. Ideally, all testers would have their own, dedicated test equipment. However, much of this equipment is very expensive so this isn’t really a practical approach in most labs.

When testing equipment is shared, the first challenge is often locating the item you need. Once it has been found, a scrap of paper or Post-It note with a hand-written scrawl might warn of testing in progress. Without names or dates, this can result in equipment being under-utilized for long periods. These notices can also be ignored, leading to interrupted tests. Changing equipment settings or opening a shield box door can negatively affect test results and create a lot of re-work.

LAMTA shares resources easily

A much better approach is to organize the RF lab so that expensive resources are shared by design. For example, radio sources (RRUs, signal generators) can be shared among multiple users by connecting them through an RF switch matrix. The switch matrix distributes the RF signals equally among several testing stations. It can also perform RF combining and attenuation so each of these test stations can be used to conduct advanced testing without needing their own variable attenuators.



Acentury’s LAMTA platform manages the RF switch matrix equipment for RF signal routing and attenuation. It allows multiple users to share all RF signals, and each tester can control what signals they work with, and in what combinations. This enables complex handover testing scenarios under MIMO and carrier aggregation conditions for everyone. And best of all, the testers do not interfere with each other.

Reserve and Protect

There are cases when test equipment simply can’t be shared. For example, RF shield boxes and RF chambers are typically operated on an exclusive basis during use. For these items, a helpful approach is to maintain a central tracking system for test equipment locations and assignments. Using such a system to reserve equipment for defined time periods by specific people can dramatically improve lab efficiency.

The LAMTA platform provides this management capability. Lab managers can assign resources to specific testers and those testers can only use the resources that have been assigned to them. This prevents a tester from making changes to equipment that could disrupt another test in progress.

With LAMTA Lab Management, the days of Post-It notes and interrupted tests are over.

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