Words of art
Wireless has many odd terms, especially for measurement and test. Aslan Technologies performs the tests below. I wrote to Mark van der Hoek (not an Aslan employee) for an explanation. He writes,
"Sweep testing involves injecting a signal into an antenna system (cables with or without the antenna attached) and measuring the reflection. In theory, we want all of the energy to go out of the antenna into space. But in reality, some gets reflected, and these reflections indicate mis-matches in the system. If they are too severe, corrective action is needed."
"Antenna Loss, Return Loss, Fault Location, Insertion Loss, VSWR Measurement are all part of sweep testing. The 'sweep' part comes from the fact that the signal is 'swept' across the frequency band of the intended application, and results recorded. Sometimes you'll find that an antenna system has a bad spot at one frequency. Or it may fail across a wide band. Typically the cable is tested first, then the antenna is connected and the whole system is tested. The antenna may be tested by itself on the ground first, but some don't like this approach as nearby objects can affect the results.
"Backhaul Testing is testing the link back to the switch, whether that is a T-1 from the local telco or a microwave link."
"Base Station Testing is simply putting the site hardware through some diagnostics."
"Ground Resistance Testing is a standard test for any telecommunications site. It's testing the quality of the system's ground."
"System Drive Test is getting into my area. Test phones and (often a special scanner) are mounted in a vehicle and driven around the area. Usually an engineer has mapped out a drive route. The data is downloaded continuously into a laptop, along with GPS data. Then the data can be plotted out and analyzed. That's where Data Analysis comes in. Problems like Pilot Pollution and Missing Neighbors show up here."
"If phones from several different operators are used, you are doing Competitive Comparison Analysis."
Mark.
Thanks, Mark! I note that Ericsson says Missing Neighbors are incorrectly configured neighborhood cell relations. And that Pilot Pollution means evaluating the primary Common Pilot Channel or CPICH. The Common Pilot Channel is fine tuned to balance cell call loads or volume. Increasing power means accepting more calls into a cell, decreasing power to the CPICH means taking fewer. The URL was here:
http://www.ericsson.com/services
/tems/articles/March_02_Investigation-WCDMA_SE.pdf (external link)