Aaronia has developed the world's first RF / EMC camera system, the SPECTRAN RF VIEW. This system consists of a Spectrum Analyzer (from the SPECTRAN RSA series) and an isotropic broadband antenna at each “pixel”. Multiple units are used when are connected via a network to a central server. An RF camera with 8x8 points (64 pixels resolution) requires 64 measurement units that way.
The antennas are arranged in equal distance in an X / Y grid. The measurement data (amplitude and/or frequency) are visualized as a "chessboard-display". Each field of the chessboard represents a measurement unit.
This resolution seems to be rather small but already allows amazingly detailed measurements of antenna spreading characteristics or the graphical classification of radiated emissions during an EMC test.
The SPECTRAN RF VIEW saves considerable measurement time and allows very detailed information on the spreading patterns of emissions. The system can be extended to any size in order to reach much higher resolutions and is already successfully in use for research purpose and product evaluation of a leading telecommunications provider.
This system, despite the massive hardware requirements is priced at less than € 100,000 for a 32 pixel system with 6 GHz frequency range. Versions that go up to 20 GHz bandwidth are also available, however they will be more expensive. A real-time version, based on the latest SPECTRAN® V5 real time spectrum analyzer generation, is scheduled for 2015.
The next evaluation step is the extension to a 3D camera system (additional Z-axis) to obtain more complex information.
