What is a Channel Emulator?
Channel emulators are test instruments that simulate a real-world radio channel between a radio transmitter and a receiver by providing a faded representation of a transmitted signal to the receiver inputs. This allows real-time performance testing of communication systems, satellite links, and other wireless devices in laboratories/indoors. They are also called fading simulator or radio channel simulator and they reproduce the fading environment defined by 3GPP and allows repeatable testing.
Channel emulators are used to testing the performance of wireless products throughout the entire product development life cycle – from R&D up to manufacturing and field acceptance by users. They are a cost-effective solution for real-time performance testing of wireless devices and also contribute to improving the development and verification efficiency of the latest communication technologies such as 5G NR, LTE-Advanced and IoT.
These emulators can support a wide range of frequency ranges and signal configurations (MIMO, SISO, MISO & SIMO) and are available with multi-fading channels configuration.
Important Parameters When Looking for Channel Emulators:
- Operating Frequency: It is the operating frequency range for which the device is fully functional or provides the best performance.
- Signal Configuration: Represents the signal configuration supported by the channel emulator, such as MIMO/SISO/MISO/SIMO.
- Number of Digital Channels: Represents the number of fading channels supported by the emulator.
- Fading Types: Represents the fading types supported by the channel emulator. Fading types can be constant, rayleigh, rice, lognormal, pure Doppler, flat, rounded, gaussian, jakes, Butterworth, user-defined, CIR, etc.
everything RF lists Channel Emulators from the leading manufacturers. Use the parametric search tools to narrow down on products based on your requirement. Once you find parts that meet your specification, download the data sheet, compare products and request quotations. Inquiries sent via everything RF are directed to the manufacturers who get back to you with a quote or information.
