September 2016Maintenance, Test & Measurement, Calibration
Bird Technologies has introduced its SiteHawk SK-200-TC, a hand-held antenna and cable analyser that operates between 300 kHz and 200 MHz. The instrument simplifies detection of problems in coaxial transmission lines and antenna systems, and pinpoints their source using distance-to-fault measurements.
The analyser provides all of the measurement capabilities required to evaluate the performance of a communication system’s transmission path, and has the same features as its higher-frequency counterpart, Bird’s SiteHawk SK-4000-TC, which operates over a frequency range of 85 MHz to 4000 MHz. The SiteHawk SK-200-TC is a rugged, compact instrument, which is easy to use by novices and veterans alike. It has an intuitive user interface displayed on its high-resolution TFT LCD colour display and 16 Gbytes of internal flash memory for storing thousands of traces and measurement setups.
The distance-to-fault measurement indicates VSWR or return loss at various points from the beginning of the transmission line all the way to the antenna and identifies the location of a problem with high resolution. The cable loss function measures insertion loss of the transmission line over a given frequency range.
The instrument makes fast swept measurements at (0,25 ms per data point) of return loss and cable loss as well as VSWR and distance to fault, and allows users to set trace capture using 51, 101, 201, 401, 801, 1601 or 3201 data points per sweep. Both X and Y scales as well as measurement units can be set by the user, as can a pass/fail limit with visual “go/no-go” indicator. There are six user-selectable markers for direct or difference measurements that can be referenced to the limit line or a recalled trace. A measurement-hold feature also allows a trace to be stored temporarily for analysis.
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